between a city divided and an oasis of peace: narratives...
TRANSCRIPT
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH [NAME OF THE SCHOOL]
This [thesis/dissertation] was presented by
[author’s name]
It was defended on [Month date, year] and approved by
[Committee Member’s Name, Academic Rank, Departmental Affiliation] [Committee Member’s Name, Academic Rank, Departmental Affiliation] [Committee Member’s Name, Academic Rank, Departmental Affiliation]
[Thesis Director/Dissertation Advisor]: [Name, Academic Rank, Departmental Affiliation]
Between a City Divided and an Oasis of Peace: Narratives of Identity and Belonging in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
by
Eric Reidy
Bachelor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Arts, University of Pittsburgh, 2012
Submitted to the Undergraduate Faculty of
Global Studies Department in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
2012
ii
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
This thesis was presented by
Eric Reidy
It was defended on
April 2, 2012
and approved by
Adam B. Seligman, Professor, Religious Studies
Leslie Hammond, Lecturer, History
Mohammed Bamyeh, Professor, Sociology
Thesis Director: David Montgomery, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
iii
Copyright © by Eric Reidy 2012
iv
Hebron and Neve Shalom/Wahat al‐Salam present a study in contrasts within the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Hebron is, perhaps, the most deeply divided city in the conflict.
It is the only Palestinian city in the West Bank with Jewish settlers living in its center and
the site of constant military presence and frequent hostilities. NSWS, on the other hand, is
the only intentionally shared village between Palestinians and Israelis within Israel.
Additionally, the Jewish settlement of Hebron and establishment of NSWS have oddly
parallel histories stemming from distinct reactions to the changing environment within
Israel in the aftermath of the June 1967 War, and both communities have produced texts
that seek to explain and persuade a broader public of the merits and importance of their
positions and activities through the articulation of collective narratives. The narratives
produced by each community articulate starkly dissimilar approaches to the construction
of identity and belonging. The different approaches of the two communities hold up
mirrors, from opposite positions, to the construction of identity and belonging within
Israeli society and its connection to the perpetuation of the conflict. Additionally, the
absence of self‐produced narratives on the part of the Palestinian community of Hebron
illuminates the historic construction of Palestinians as an illegitimate people incapable of
presenting itself to the outside world without the legitimating mediation of a ‘reliable’
third‐party. Finally, the contrast between the construction of identity and belonging by the
Between a City Divided and an Oasis of Peace:
Narratives of Identity and Belonging in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
Eric Reidy, BPhil
University of Pittsburgh, 2012
v
Jewish settlers of Hebron and the community of NSWS, as well as NSWS’s activities in the
field of intergroup encounter work, point to the possibility of creating third spaces within
the setting of the conflict for seemingly mutually exclusive sides to negotiate new
possibilities of existence outside the essentialized and exclusionary confines of the current
paradigm.
vi
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
~Rumi1
1 Rūmi Jalāl al‐Dīn and Coleman Barks, The essential Rumi (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). 36.
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Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction:................................................................................................................................2
2.0 Impressions of Place: ................................................................................................................9
2.1 Imagined Geographies: ...................................................................................................................... 9
2.2 Hebron: A City Divided:....................................................................................................................10
2.3 Neve Shalom/Wahat alSalam: An Oasis of Peace:..................................................................15
2.4 Separate Worlds: ................................................................................................................................17
3.0 The June 1967 War: ................................................................................................................ 19
3.1 AlQudsJerusalem: June 1967.......................................................................................................19
3.2 Lead up to 1967: .................................................................................................................................19
3.3 Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs: ................................................................................21
3.4 Jewish Israelis: ....................................................................................................................................21
3.5 Palestinian Dislocation: ...................................................................................................................22
3.6 Palestinian Israelis:...........................................................................................................................24
3.7 The June 1967 War and a New Map: ............................................................................................27
3.8 The Ambiguities of Victory and Defeat: .....................................................................................28
3.9 “Will we forget them?”: The Jewish Settlement of Hebron: ................................................34
3.10 The Sons of Abraham: Establishing Neve Shalom/Wahat alSalam: ..............................40
3.11 Contrasting legacies: ......................................................................................................................43
4.0 Narratives of Hebron’s Jewish Settlers: ........................................................................... 45
4.1 Hebron: A Space of Conflict:............................................................................................................45
4.2 History, Belonging, Memory, and the Other in Jewish Hebron:..........................................45
4.3 The Hebron Settlers in Israeli Society: .......................................................................................53
4.4 Narratives of Irreconcilable Difference: ....................................................................................57
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5.0 The Problematic of Palestinian SelfPresentation:...................................................... 60
5.1 Who will speak for the Palestinians? ..........................................................................................60
5.2 Recovering Palestinian Voices: .....................................................................................................61
5.3 Discerning Palestinian Perspectives:..........................................................................................67
6.0 Narratives of Neve Shalom/Wahat alSalam:................................................................. 71
6.1 Understanding the Oasis: ................................................................................................................71
6.2 NSWS’s SelfPresentation: ...............................................................................................................72
6.3 The work of the village:....................................................................................................................74
6.4 NSWS’s Foundational ideology: .....................................................................................................76
6.5 Construction of Space at NSWS:.....................................................................................................80
6.6 The Encounter Process: ...................................................................................................................82
6.7 Reflection, SelfCriticism, and Applicability: ............................................................................85
6.8 NSWS and Israeli Society: ................................................................................................................90
7.0 Conclusion: ................................................................................................................................ 93
APPENDIX A: ......................................................................................................................................100
A.1 Map of Israel/Palestine................................................................................................................. 100
A.2 Israel and surrounding States after June 1967 War ........................................................... 101
A.3 Territory Near NSWS ..................................................................................................................... 102
A.4 Hebron and Surrounding Areas................................................................................................. 103
Bibliography......................................................................................................................................104
2
1.0 Introduction: In 1903 African American author, intellectual, and civil rights pioneer W.E.B DuBois
articulated the following possible responses of an oppressed group to the conditions of
their oppression:
The attitude of the imprisoned group may take three forms,—a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self‐realization and self‐development despite environing opinion.2
The essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk goes on to
argue that only one of the three options above demonstrates a refusal to acquiesce to the
belief that inequality based on group identity is inevitable. The first response stems from
the anger generated by the experience of marginalization, and manifests itself as the
conviction that, in order to be free, the oppressed group must separate itself from their
oppressors, violently if need be. The second response, far from demanding justice of any
sort, maintains that the oppressed group must adopt fully the ways of the dominant group
and, essentially, deny the merit and existence of their own identity and culture. The third
response acknowledges the differences between groups but refuses to accept that those
differences are equated with deficiencies, as the dominant group asserts.3 Instead, the third
response necessitates a robust pursuit of justice in order for the oppressed, in the words of
2 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books 1989). 34. 3 Ibid., 34‐38.
3
Paulo Freire, “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”4 The third response to
oppression put forth by DuBois is, in fact, the only response to oppression that calls for an
altering of relations between peoples, and thereby necessitates an honest engagement with
the systems that support inequalities and perpetuate injustices. Implied in the response is
the need to participate in a reimagining of possibilities for the future outside the confines of
the entrenched status quo.
Despite being written over one hundred years ago and in the context of a different
conflict, DuBois’ analysis is relevant to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict today. In the past
twenty years, the Peace Process between Palestinians and Israelis has proven incapable of
moving the two parties past the entrenched inequalities and injustices of the conflict. Even
when the process has moved forward, such as during the early years of the Oslo Peace Plan,
many scholars now argue, it has achieved little other than solidifying existing inequalities
through the legitimizing framework of negotiations and institutions without addressing the
actual sources of the conflict.5 At present, the conflict appears to be stuck between
competing claims of belonging made by two nationalist groups over the same piece of
territory, and the inability, or unwillingness, of those groups to disentangle themselves
from each other demographically and geographically in order to realize the sovereignty of
each group over separated pieces of territory. In other words, the Peace Process is limited
by the homogenizing imperative of the nation state paradigm in which the conflict is
embedded and by which it is perpetuated. As such, the current setting of the
4 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993). 23. 5 Derek Gregory, The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004). 102‐06; Jeff Halper, "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control," Middle East Report, no. 216 (2000): 14‐19; Noura Erakat, "Beyond Sterile Negotiations: Lookig for a Leadership with a Strategy," Jadaliyya(2012), http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4259/beyond‐sterile‐negotiations_looking‐for‐a‐leadersh.
4
Palestinian/Israeli conflict calls out for the kind of radical reimagining of possibilities for
existence between peoples implied in DuBois third response, and the imperative to engage
in a creative reassessment of the future possibilities for the Palestinian/Israel conflict
forms the central position of this work.
Additionally, this paper adopts an analytical approach that is critical of received
wisdom concerning the lenses through which the conflict is viewed. For instance, the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict is often discussed as a series of fragmented conflicts such as the
one between Hamas and the State of Israel, or the struggle of Palestinian‐Israelis, also
referred to as Arab Israelis, for equality within Israel, or the conflict between Hamas and
Fatah, or the negotiations between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. As
such, the conflict appears as a series of separate inter‐group tensions requiring distinct
responses and solutions. While focusing on the separate parts of the conflict provides for in
depth analysis of its different currents, it ultimately obscures the essentialized construction
of identity and its connection to exclusionary claims of belonging that form the root of the
conflict. Consequently, it obscures the resultant, unifying experience of dispossession,
displacement, and occupation employed as a systematic policy of separation that has
created the gradations within the conflict.
In fact, despite the various fragmentations of the Palestinian people within the
conflict, for the approximately 5.8 million6 Palestinians living in the historic territory of
Palestine, between the Gaza Strip, Israel, and the West Bank, the State of Israel exercises
ultimate political control. Within Israel, Palestinian Israelis are minority citizens of the
6 "The World Factbook," Central Intelligence Agency, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the‐world‐factbook/.
5
“self‐proclaimed state of the Jewish people.”7 In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are considered
permanent residents of the Israeli State, but are not granted full citizenship rights.
Additionally, despite ‘disengaging’ from the Gaza Strip in 2006, Israel continues to control
the airspace and borders of the territory, effectively exerting authority over Gaza’s contact
and commerce with the outside world. Finally, as agreed upon in the Oslo negotiations, the
West Bank is divided into areas A, B, and C. Area C, 61 percent of the territory, is under
complete Israeli control, Area B, 21 percent of the territory, is under Israel military
authority and Palestinian civil authority, and Area A, 18 percent of the territory, is
administered by the Palestinian Authority.8 However, checkpoints and bypass roads built
by Israel for Jewish settlers living in the West Bank divide the areas of the West Bank under
the control of the Palestinian Authority from each other, the borders between Areas A, B,
and C are often ambiguous and unmarked, and Israel maintains control over resources
below the ground, the airspace, and the borders of the territory.9 Anthropologist Jeff Halper
refers to the system governing the lives of Palestinians as a “matrix of control” that enables
Israel to exercise ultimate authority over the Palestinians by fragmenting the territory and
setting up a series of obstacles to block Palestinian self‐assertion while simultaneously
relieving Israel of responsibility for the inhabitants of the territories.10
Ultimately, the lens of fragmentation magnifies particular divisions within the
conflict while obscuring its underlying dynamics of control. However, those dynamics form
7 Dina Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011). xii. 8 See PASSIA’s Palestine Map series for detailed cartographic depictions of the spatial fragmentation of the Occupied Territories. http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/0_pal_facts_MAPS.htm. 9 Gregory, The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq: 103‐04; Wendy Pearlman, Occupied voices: stories of everyday life from the second Intifada (New York: Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2003). xiv; Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: xii. 10 Halper, "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control," 14‐19.
6
the unifying link between the experiences of Palestinians, whether as second‐class citizens
struggling for equality in Israel or as residents of the West Bank attempting to negotiate the
blockages and bureaucracy of occupation. Furthermore, the regime of control exercised by
Israel over the Palestinians, stemming from the logic of essentialized identities and
exclusivist claims of belonging, aims to create a separation between the two peoples while
maintaining the existence of Israeli hegemony over the territory. Therefore, the approach
adopted in this paper views the experiences of the intentionally fragmented areas of the
conflict as intimately related to one another, and explores an approach to peace, following
from DuBois’ third response to oppression, that necessitates an engagement with and
transformation of established dynamics through a reimagining of possibilities for existence
between peoples.
However, the reimagining of possibilities must be connected to material realities in
order to avoid the all‐to‐common disjointedness between theory and the lived experiences
of the conflict. Therefore, the following study is grounded in the settings, histories, and
narratives of the Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents of Hebron and the bi‐national
and bilingual village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al‐Salam [NSWS]. My personal experience of
visiting both Hebron and NSWS over the course an extended trip to Israel/Palestine during
the summer of 2010 forms a significant rationale for choosing these locations to study.
Although I did not spend enough time in each location to conduct an ethnography, I have
returned to my impressions of them time and again when thinking about both the
challenges and possibilities of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
Hebron and NSWS present a study in contrasts within the conflict. Hebron is,
perhaps, the most deeply divided city in the conflict. It is the only Palestinian city in the
7
West Bank with Jewish settlers living in its center and the site of constant military presence
and frequent hostilities. NSWS, on the other hand, is the only intentionally shared village
between Palestinians and Israelis within Israel. Additionally, the Jewish settlement of
Hebron and establishment of NSWS have oddly parallel histories stemming from distinct
reactions to the changing environment within Israel in the aftermath of the June 1967 War,
and both communities have produced texts that seek to explain and persuade a broader
public of the merits and importance of their positions and activities through the
articulation of collective narratives.11
The narratives produced by each community articulate starkly dissimilar
approaches to the construction of identity and belonging that hold up mirrors, from
opposite positions, to the construction of identity and belonging within Israeli society and
its connection to the perpetuation of the conflict. Additionally, the absence of self‐produced
narratives on the part of the Palestinian community of Hebron illuminates the historic
construction of Palestinians as an illegitimate people incapable of presenting itself to the
outside world without the legitimating mediation of a ‘reliable’ third‐party. Finally, the
contrast between the construction of identity and belonging by the Jewish settlers of
Hebron and the community of NSWS, as well as NSWS’s activities in the field of intergroup
encounter work, point to the possibility of creating third spaces within the setting of the
conflict for seemingly mutually exclusive sides to negotiate new possibilities of existence
outside the essentialized and exclusionary confines of the current paradigm. 11 According to Salomon, “Collective narratives are the comprehensive collection of stories, beliefs, aspirations, histories, and current explanations that a group holds about itself and its surrounding. Collective narratives are social constructions that coherently interrelate a sequence of historical and current events; they are accounts of a community’s collective experiences, embodied in its belief system and represent the collective’s symbolically constructed shared identity” (Gavriel Salomon, "A Narrative‐Based View of Coexistence Education," Journal of Social Issues 60, no. 2 (2004): 274.).
8
In order to develop a robust and grounded understanding and analysis of Hebron
and NSWS, the first chapter sketches a series of vignettes that illuminates the basic
geographic and spatial composition of each place as well as scenes from everyday life that
speak to the experience of the conflict within each. Building on the sensory impression of
spaces and experiences in chapter one, chapter two presents the histories of both Hebron
and NSWS from their roots prior to 1967 through their inception in the aftermath of the
June 1967 War and outlines the historical events and trends that have shaped the
contemporary settings of both places. Chapter three moves on to focus specifically on the
Jewish settlers of Hebron and the narratives of identity and belonging articulated by the
Settler community. The chapter also analyzes the Hebron settlers’ narrative in relation to
the secular Zionism’s narrative of identity and belonging. Chapter four shifts focus to the
Palestinian community of Hebron and the historic construction of their reliance on third
parties to relay their experiences and voices to the outside world. Additionally, the chapter
analyzes the Palestinian voices and perspectives that are heard to try to understand the
conceptions of identity and belonging developed by Palestinians living in Hebron. The fifth
chapter focuses on the approach to identity and belonging developed and articulated
through the ideologies, construction of space, and activities of NSWS. Also, the chapter
analyzes NSWS’s approach to identity and belonging in comparison to the approach
characterizing the mainstream of Israeli society. Finally, the conclusion synthesizes the
analysis of the preceding chapters into a critique of the limiting effect of the conflict’s
situatedness in the essentialist and exclusionary setting of the nation state paradigm, and
builds from NSWS’s work to propose the possibility of creating third spaces for the
reimagining of possibilities for existence between opposing sides in the conflict.
9
2.0 Impressions of Place:
2.1 Imagined Geographies: During the height of European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, no place in the
Middle East other than Egypt garnered more attention than the province of Ottoman
Palestine. Pilgrims, government representatives, and travelers of all sorts flocked to the
territory in order to “rediscover” the Holy Land. The travelers came, according to Beshara
Doumani, “with a single fervent wish in their hearts: to traverse an unchanged landscape
where biblical journeys could be endlessly reenacted.”12 As a result, while walking over the
territory of Ottoman Palestine, nineteenth century European writers constructed an
imagined geography13 of the land and the people who inhabited it through the lens of
biblical and Western imperial narratives. The land imagined by European writers was
empty of civilization, and the writers’ depictions of it formed the epistemological basis for
European domination, exploitation, and occupation. Now in the form of debates concerning
the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the dominant discourses on the land of Palestine, its people,
and its history continue to follow the basic contours established by the nineteenth century
writings.14
Departing from the footsteps of the past, the following section presents vignettes of
various settings and scenes one might encounter in Hebron and NSWS. Instead of imposing
12 Beshara B. Doumani, "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History," Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (1992): 6. 13 Gregory builds off of Edward Said’s term imagined geographies to refer to narrative “constructions that fold distance into difference through a series of spatializations”(Gregory, The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq: 17.) in our minds. Imagined geogrphies, in the word’s of Said, “allows one to see new things… as versions of a previously known thing.”(ibid., 18.) 14 Doumani, "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History," 8‐9.
10
predetermined metaphoric significance on Hebron and NSWS, the vignettes depict
snapshots of them as physical and human spaces. The depictions do not delve into the
intimate details of life for the groups and individuals living in each place, but present
striking aspects of their public space and public life related to the conflict. The material for
the vignettes is drawn from my visits to both locations in the summer of 2010 and an array
of online content depicting various facets of life in both Hebron and NSWS from multiple
perspectives.15 The purpose of the vignettes is to render an impression of the spaces from
which to build an understanding of the people, ideologies, activities, and narratives of each,
and to situate these spaces in relation to the broader conflict and the questions they raise
about belonging and identity in Israel/Palestine.
2.2 Hebron: A City Divided: In vain do you seek the barbed wire fences.
You know such things
Do not disappear. Another city perhaps
Is now cut in two: two lovers
Separated; other flesh is tormented now
With these thorns, refuses to be stone.
~ Jerusalem 1967 by Yehuda Amichai16
Other than the sand colored stone buildings that spread out from the Old City at
Hebron’s center, the city’s landscape is mostly arid. The occasional clump of trees, shrubs,
or flowers breaks the otherwise flat tones of the surroundings. In the old city, closely
crowded buildings with flat utilitarian facades line the streets, and the large, drab green
metal doors covering the commercial spaces on the ground floors of the buildings are
15 "Neve Shalom Wahat al Salam," (2010); "A Presentation of Neve Shalom/Wahat al‐Salam, the Oasis of Peace," (2009); "Arabs with Drums and PLO flag March in Hebron," (2010); "Hebron: A World Divided," (2009); "Hebron," (2009). 16 Yehuda Amichai, A Life of Poetry 19481994, trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994).
11
mostly closed. In areas close to Jewish settlements in the city, many of the gates are spray
painted with large, black Jewish stars, and Israeli flags are draped from windows and
strung across the streets. Graffiti, in Arabic and in Hebrew, abounds in most parts of the
city. 17
At the heart of the old city is a monumental building made of impressively large
stone blocks. According to the Judeo‐Christian‐Islamic tradition, the building, known as the
Ibrahimi Mosque or Cave of Machpelah, sits atop the burial site of the Patriarchs and
Matriarchs of the three religions. Additionally, according to Jewish tradition, the building is
constructed on the location of Abraham’s first purchase of land in the Promised Land. A
checkpoint stands between the street and the entrance to the building, and a soldier
wearing an olive green uniform checks identity cards as visitors pass through a metal
detector. Up a set of stairs leading to the entrance, two more soldiers stand with their
hands resting on assault rifles. Behind the soldiers there is a stout, indestructible looking
metal cube with thick, bulletproof glass windows and a thick door that locks from the
inside.
The space of the building is divided in two. Prayer carpets line the floor of the
Muslim section, ornamental chandeliers hang from the ceiling, two large mausoleum‐like
structures mark the location of the graves of two of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and
bullet holes18 are still visible in the walls despite being plastered over. Past the main prayer
hall at the back of a room marking another gravesite, there is a small window. On the other 17 See appendix A.4 for a map of Hebron and surrounding areas. 18 On Jewish holiday of Purim in February 1994, settler and Kiryat Arba resident Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque wearing his Israeli army uniformed and armed with an assault rifle. He opened fire on Muslim Palestinians praying in the mosque and killed twenty‐nine people before he was beaten to death. The massacre occurred during the month of Ramadan six months after the signing of the Oslo Accords. (Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit Wayne State University Press, 2009). 168.).
12
side of the window, Jewish men dressed in traditional black and white garb can be seen
swaying at prayer. The window is the only point of connection between the two sides of the
building, and visitors are cautioned not to stand in front of it.
To the right, outside of the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs is an entrance
to the old souk, the economic center of the old city. At the entrance of the souk is a double
checkpoint19 consisting of a series of revolving gates and metal detectors under a stone
overpass. People line up at the checkpoint waiting to be ushered through by the soldiers on
the other side. A soldier keeps his gun trained on the people as they move through the
revolving gates one at a time. On the other side of the checkpoint, a group of school
children stands waiting to be let through. A little boy in a neat school uniform slings his
blue and yellow backpack over his stomach and unzips it as he walks up to the soldier
motioning him to step forward. The soldier in his dark green uniform, with a hand resting
on his assault rifle, waves a metal detector over and inside the boy’s backpack. The other
school children wear their backpacks in a similar fashion, and the routine is repeated for
each schoolchild on a daily basis.
Inside the souk, the shops along the corridor are mostly shuttered, and a tangle of
netting hangs across the street between the first and second stories of buildings. Caught in
the nets is an array of refuse that has been dumped from the Jewish settlers’ apartments up
above. The souk is nearly deserted. Most of the shops that are still open are selling
19 Hebron has been divided into Jewish and Palestinian sectors of control since a set of agreements between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Under the agreements, Israel has full security control over areas of Jewish settlement in the Old City and surrounding areas deemed necessary for the movement of settlers and Israeli soldiers (known as H1) while the Palestinian Authority has control over the rest of the city (known as H2). The system of checkpoints controls access to and movement within the Israeli controlled section of Hebron where approximately twenty thousand Palestinians live. (Lamis Andoni, "Redefining Oslo: Negotiating the Hebron Protocol," Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 3 (1997): 18‐19.)
13
keffiyehs,20 Arabic coffee pots, backgammon boards, and other items appealing to tourists.
The section of the city past the souk is also nearly deserted. Soldiers are stationed
periodically along the tops of buildings in camouflage nests, and the streets are strewn with
loose rocks and dust, and cement and barbed wire barricades cut off all of the streets
where they intersect with Shuhada Street. Soldiers stand at cement barriers at the
entrances to Shuhada Street that have not been entirely blocked off. Once a main
thoroughfare, access to Shuhada Street is now restricted for Palestinians. The street itself is
lined with shops, all of which are closed, and the windows and front doors of houses and
apartments along the street are sealed off. Vines with bright violet flowers grow across the
fronts of the buildings lining the street. The men walking along the street wear slacks and
yarmulkes,21 and the women wear long skirts and keep their hair covered. Most of the men
have handguns strapped to their hips and some have assault rifles slung over their
shoulders. Occasionally, a heavily armored army vehicle rumbles down the street or a
group of soldiers passes by on patrol. The terrain steepens on the far side of the street from
the old city, rising toward the more recently constructed buildings of the Jewish
settlements.
At one of the barricades blocking access to the street, people gather for a protest. A
group of Palestinian youth with drums and bright colored costumes plays a marching tune
as soldiers and international observers take their positions. The protesters push against
the barricade and some begin to throw rocks. The soldiers fire off a barrage of teargas and
the protesters scatter and regroup. The skirmish continues as teenage boys wearing
20 A Keffiyeh is a traditional Arab scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. 21 A yarmulke (also known as a kippah) is a small circular cap worn by men in all denominations of Judaism, but less common outside of times of prayer for Conservative and Reform Jews.
14
keffiyehs make their way down an alley to throw rocks at the soldiers who fire another
barrage of teargas as the youth retreat. Later in the day, a group of Orthodox Jewish men
and boys led by a community elder wearing a black, wide brimmed hat and a suit stroll
assuredly down the same streets where soldiers and Palestinian protesters skirmished
earlier. As they walk, the men and boys clap their hands and sing up‐beat songs. On either
side, soldiers in full combat gear flank the gathering as the men and boys form circles to
dance, and the parade continues on down a street in the Old City draped with Israeli flags.
As the Settlers’22 demonstration disperses, a group of boys and girls linger outside
of one house on the street and pick up rocks. None of the boys or girls look older than ten.
The girls wear long skirts and their arms are covered. The boys wear yarmulkes and the
strings from their tzitzit23 swing as they heave the stones at the only house on the street
without a Jewish flag. Girls and boys repeatedly step back to gather more rocks and come
back to throw them. One boy, smaller than the rest, trots forward with the unsteady gate of
a toddler. One arm is cocked next to his head with a rock clutched in his small fingers. As he
reaches the edge of the road, he swings his arm forward and sends the rock toppling
against the iron grating surrounding the stairwell, entrance, windows, and balcony of the
house. Two Palestinian teenage girls stand in the stairwell behind the metal grating.
“You’re dogs! Get away from here!” they yell, as a soldier stands behind the children in his
green uniform with his hands resting on his rifle watching the scene unfold.
22 The term “the Settlers” is capitalized in places where it signifies the settlers associated with Hebron and other religiously motivated settlements in the Occupied Territories. The capitalization draws a distinction between religiously motivated settlers and economic settlers who have moved to well established settlements around the Jerusalem basin due to economic incentives given by the government. 23 Tzitzit are knotted fringes worn by religious Jews.
15
2.3 Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam: An Oasis of Peace: I would have wanted…
to be a child in another country.
In a country where there would be no news
about the dead and the wounded and wars.
In a country which wouldn’t need an army or soldiers;
and where one would not be afraid or worried all the time.
In a country where there would always be peace.
~ Written by a twelveyear old child living in NSWS24
Without the separation wall between the West Bank and Israel it would take a little
over an hour to drive from Hebron to NSWS.25 The road to the village breaks off from a
highway about twenty miles northeast of Jerusalem. Green fields spread out on either side
of the road before it begins to ascend a hill, and the expansive view that can be seen from
below becomes obscured by shrubbery, flowers, and trees. NSWS is situated on top of the
hill, and its white houses are tucked into curving streets integrated with an abundance of
plant life. Close to the main entrance of the community there are modest administrative
office buildings, an indoor and an outdoor community gathering area, a swimming pool, a
hotel, and a café. A little further up the road past a garden blooming with vibrant pink
flowers is a newly built library, a building that houses the School for Peace, and,
underneath a rainbow archway, the community’s primary school. Down from the main area
of the village, accessible only by a walking path lined with green plants and flowers, sits a
white dome in a field of grass. The dome, a pluralistic spiritual center, is located at the edge
of the hill and overlooks green and yellow fields dotted with pine groves. Behind the dome,
24 F Grace Feuerverger, Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a JewishPalestinian Village in Israel (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001). xv. 25 See appendix A.3 for a map of territory where NSWS is located.
16
the red roof of a monastery forms a silhouette against the coastal plane, which vanishes
into the distance.
Outside the elementary school, a girl in a blue sweatshirt grabs a boy’s orange shirt.
He playfully begins to run as the girl swings behind him. Other children join in and a game
of tag ensues. Inside a school classroom, first or second grade students sit squirming in
their seats. Their hair, skin, and eyes span the spectrum from light to dark, and some of the
girls wear hijab.26 On the walls of the classroom are brightly colored pictures of animals
with their names written underneath in both Arabic and Hebrew. Also, on the chalkboard
are notes scrawled in both Arabic and Hebrew. In a common room outside of the classroom
there is a Christmas tree decorated in red ribbons and sparkling stars, and a miniature
Kaaba27 and Menorah28 sit side by side on a table next to the tree.
Down the path at the School for Peace, a group of adults, mirroring the diversity of
the elementary school students, sits around in a small circle. The adults lean in toward each
other talking and listening eagerly, and a Palestinian woman and an Israeli woman from
the School for Peace staff sit in the circle guiding the conversation. The Palestinian woman
speaks first in Arabic followed by the Jewish woman in Hebrew. At the entrance of the
school, a group of ninth and tenth graders from a private school in Haifa arrives for an
overnight stay at the village. After a brief introduction the students are led down to the
holistic spiritual center where they stand outside mingling and taking photographs with
each other. Like the children in the primary school at NSWS and the adults at the School for
Peace, the students from Haifa represent a cross section of Israeli society. Their teachers,
26 A hijab is a head covering worn by religious Muslim women, and is also a term used to refer to modest dress in general. 27 The Kaaba is the holiest site in Islam, and is located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. 28 A Menorah is a candelabrum with nine branches used in the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.
17
with growing agitation in their voices, try to get them to enter the white dome in respectful
silence as a community member explains the building’s significance.
Inside, periodic snickers echo off the curved walls and whispers carry across the
space designed for silence. A teacher angrily instructs a number of students to leave.
Gradually, they all filter out and walk back to the School for Peace where they assemble in a
circle to talk. Some lean back in a posture of pompous indifference. Others look down,
inspecting their hands and shoes. A NSWS resident tries to coax them into conversation,
but the students only exchange curt comments that are greeted by a mixture of brief
approving nods and looks of exasperation and hurt by their classmates. A frustrated
teacher instructs the students that, despite being an integrated Palestinian and Jewish
class, their time at NSWS may be the only opportunity they have to address the conflict
openly with each other. The students exchange another round of accusations and debasing
comments as each group withdraws along the lines of division in the conflict into its
separate world.
2.4 Separate Worlds: Just as the worlds that the high school students from Haifa retreat into when
attempting to discuss the conflict are marked by stark dissimilarities, imbalances, and
opposing experiences, the physical aspects and public life of Hebron and NSWS constitute
similarly incongruous realities. Barriers of physical, social, and emotional division mark the
landscape of Hebron, and are rigidly enforced by the omnipresent apparatus of conflict in
the form of checkpoints and military patrols as well as through the performative enactment
of each community’s assertion of belonging in the form of protests and stone throwing.
NSWS, on the other hand, appears as an oasis of tranquility, balance, and respite from the
18
external currents of conflict. The village’s situatedness within those currents, however, is
constantly reified by the centrality of addressing the conflict in the work and composition
of the village and the conflict’s constant intrusion into its everyday life. Even so, the fact
that NSWS and Hebron exist as such markedly different places, in terms of the relations
between Palestinians and Israelis within them, no more than forty‐five miles apart and
within the same pervasive setting of conflict is striking. Their paradoxical existence raises a
number of pressing questions about the history of each place, its position in relation to the
broader conflict, and what an understanding of the narratives and activities of the
communities inhabiting each offers in terms understanding the demarcation of identity and
belonging in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The following chapter turns to an exploration
of the establishment of Jewish settlement in Hebron and NSWS in the environment within
Israel following the June 1967 War.
19
3.0 The June 1967 War:
3.1 Al-Quds29-Jerusalem: June 1967 On June 29th, 1967 crowds of Israelis from the western side of Jerusalem crossed into East
Jerusalem and crowds of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem crossed into the western side
of the city. The two populations mingled in marketplaces, buying goods from each other.
Palestinians went to the cinemas in the Western side of the city. Young Israeli boys
ventured into the eastern side of the city to see the Jordanian license plates on Palestinian
cars. Some Palestinians went to look at the homes that they were displaced from during the
war of 1948, and thousands of Israelis flocked to see the Western Wall and other religious
sites on the eastern side of the city. It was the first time that the two populations came in
contact with each other since the city was divided in 1948. 30
3.2 Lead up to 1967: The drama of the reunification or occupation of Jerusalem was part of Israel’s
military victory over the armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the June 1967 War. According
to the common scholarly narrative, the war, known as the Six‐Days War in Israel and al‐
Naksa, “setback” in Arabic, was the culmination of nearly a decade of escalating tensions
between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Vitriolic, anti‐Israeli rhetoric by Arab leaders, the
unwillingness of Arab leaders to engage in serious peace talks, and a Soviet Union
supported buildup of Arab militaries convinced Israelis that their young state was in grave
danger. It would only be a matter of time, they thought, before the Arab countries attacked 29 Al‐Quds is the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem. The word means “The Holy” in Arabic. 30 Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 434‐35.
20
again and tried to push Israel into the sea.31 Additionally, a steady number of cross‐border
raids by Palestinian guerilla groups, largely supported by Syria, added to Israel’s sense of
endangerment.32
The Arab countries, on the other hand, were struggling to modernize their
economies, provide opportunity for large segments of their populations mired in poverty,
and control the upheavals that accompanied the dramatic changes to their traditional social
and economic structures. Furthermore, Arab governments sought to preserve their newly
gained self‐determination from the interventionist policies of Western powers such as
Britain and France. Israel’s aggressive and militaristic posture and collaboration with
Western powers in the region was evidence that the new nation was a bulwark of Western
imperialism in the Middle East.33 Resistance to foreign domination and the popularity of
exacting retribution for Israel’s displacement of Palestinians in 1948 provided incentive for
the Arab governments to militarize and reciprocate Israel’s aggressive stance in the region.
Exacerbating the situation, the United States and the Soviet Union jostled to turn dynamics
within the region in their favor and in so doing subjected regional hostility to the additional
tensions between the Cold War superpowers.34
31 Add Nasser quote about pushing Israel into the sea in this foot note(?) 32 Richard Bordeaux Parker, "The Six‐Day War: a retrospective" (Gainesville, 1996), 1, 6; Michael B. Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 1, 10; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 14, 144‐45; W. Cleon Skousen, Fantastic victory; Israel's rendezvous with destiny (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967). xvi. 33 In 1956 Israel entered into a secret military compact with Britain and France. According to the compact, Israel would invade the Sinai Peninsula in order to give Britain and France a pretext to reoccupy the Suez Canal for its protection. In return, Israel would receive naval and air support as they attacked Egypt’s army and opened the Straits of Tiran. The planned military action, known as the Sinai Campaign, began on 29 October 1956 and bolstered Arab leader’s claims that Israel was a colonialist tool in the Middle East. (Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 148‐49, 240‐41.) 34 Parker, "The Six‐Day War: a retrospective," 1‐2; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 2, 6.
21
3.3 Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs: The common scholarly narrative, summarized above, of the lead up to the June 1967
War places it within the regional and geopolitical setting of the Arab‐Israeli conflict. While
important, the focus on the political tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors within
the geopolitical setting of the Cold War forms only part of the setting for the June 1967 War
and its impact. Importantly, the focus abstracts the discussion of the war from the
dynamics at play both within and between Israeli and Palestinian societies. As a result,
Israelis and particularly Palestinians become marginal actors within a cast of superstar,
international personalities35 despite the fact that the dynamics between the two societies
form the center around which the broader conflict pivots. Importantly, the focus on
regional and geopolitical analysis obscures the distinct yet interrelated crises taking places
in Israeli and Palestinian society in the years leading up to June 1967. The respective crises
of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs within historic Palestine leading up to the June
1967 war and the impact of the war on their societies constitute the historical setting in
which Jewish settlement of Hebron and the establishment of NSWS emerged as viable ideas
and actionable projects.
3.4 Jewish Israelis: For Jewish Israelis, the years leading up the June 1967 war were ones of crippling
economic recession and deep personal and societal questioning. In the 1960s Israel had a
population of 2.3 million people. The rapid growth enjoyed by Israeli economy during the
first decade and a half of the states’ existence slowed to around one percent annually in the
mid‐1960s. With the economic downturn, the number of Jews in the Diaspora seeking to 35 For example, Egpytian President Gamal Abdel Nasser is presented as the most important figure in the Palestinian national movement in the lead up to the June 1967 War, while the experience and organization of Palestinian refugee communities, or Palestinians living in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is largely obscured.
22
make Israel their home quickly dwindled, and thousands of Israeli Jews emigrated from the
seemingly tottering state. Unemployment reached above ten percent and peaked at over
twelve percent in the year before the war. With the soaring unemployment, the sense of
possibility and national purpose that permeated the early years of the state gave way to
despair and questioning of the very core of the State of Israel. Speaking to the crisis of faith
in the basic tenets of the state, one newspaper went as far as to declare, “this project has
failed.”36 Acutely aware of the rhetoric of Arab leaders, the recent history of the Holocaust,
the brutal reversal of economic and societal fortunes in the prior decade, and with
dwindling faith in their young state, Israelis felt as if they were poised on the precipice of
annihilation in the months leading up to the war.37
3.5 Palestinian Dislocation: While the root of the societal crisis in Israel prior to the war was economic, the crisis
for Palestinians was primarily about dislocation stemming from the exodus of Palestinian
refugees accompanying Israel’s military victory in 1948. Of the roughly 900,00038
Palestinians living in the territory Israel came to control after 1948, eight out of ten fled or
were driven out during the course of the war. Put another way, 650,000 to 750,00039
Palestinians became refugees in 1948 as a result of the war. In Gaza, 200,000 refugees
joined with a local population of 80,000 Palestinians. In the West Bank, 425,000 refugees 36 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 14. 37 Parker, "The Six‐Day War: a retrospective," 4; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 17, 27; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 14‐15. 38 This number does not include Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank prior to 1948. 39 The number of Palestinians displaced and the events surrounding their displacement are highly contested within the historical record. For this paper I used the data that appeared most frequently in my research, which engaged with historiography from both sides. Additionally, Israeli scholar Benny Morris has written extensively on the topic using material from various Israeli archives. (Benny Morris, "The Harvest of 1948 and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," Middle East Journal 40, no. 4 (1986); Benny Morris, "Refabricating 1948: Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians." . Efraim Karsh," Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 2 (1998); Benny Morris, "Yosef Weitz and the Transfer Committees, 1948‐49," Middle Eastern Studies 22, no. 4 (1986).)
23
joined a local population of 360,000. Additionally, 104,000 refugees ended up in camps in
Lebanon, 110,000 entered Transjordan40, 82,000 entered Syria, and 12,000 others
ventured to Iraq, Egypt, Libya, London, and other parts of the world.41
Instead of constituting the majority in a unified political entity, Palestinian refugees
were now dispersed between a number of countries and territories. The majority of
Palestinians were uprooted from their villages and towns and entered into entirely new
social, economic, and political configurations in refugee camps and new communities.
Additionally, the political leadership of the Palestinian national community mirrored the
spatial dislocation of Palestinians themselves. National leaders from prior to the war lost
much of their legitimacy due to the tragedy of dislocation and could no longer speak on
behalf of or mobilize large segments of the population. The annexation of the West Bank by
King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt’s extension of control over the Gaza Strip further
exacerbated the fact that after 1948 the Palestinians were a people predominantly
separated from the territory at the base of their collective sense of national identity and
dispersed among no less than five separate political and geographical entities.42
As a consequence of their dislocation, the Palestinian national movement entered a
stage of crisis. Instead of self‐representation, the leaders of Arab countries in the region
became the voices and strategists of the Palestinians and their national movement. In the
early 1960s, a number of small and fragmented political and militant organization emerged
primarily from Palestinian refugee populations in various countries. Arab regimes 40 These numbers reflect the distribution of Palestinian refugees prior to Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. Therefore, refugees in the West Bank and Transjordan are recorded separately. 41 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries : a people's history (London: Zed Press, 1979). 99‐100; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 67; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 7. 42 Sayigh, Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries : a people's history: 98; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 6.
24
supported the groups as pawns in their regional rivalries with Israel and each other and in
order to garner support among Arab populations who felt a deep, emotional connection to
the Palestinian cause. The groups launched attacks against strategic targets inside Israel
from their strongholds in Palestinian refugee camps or towns in Lebanon, Syria, and the
West Bank. In the decade prior to the war, attacks from the militant groups resulted in the
deaths of 189 Israeli civilians. In response to the deaths, the Israeli military adopted a
policy of retaliating against the border populations where the militants staged their
operations from as opposed to the Arab regimes that supported and supplied the militants.
Israel’s retaliation for the cross border attacks involved the blowing up of houses and often,
civilian deaths. Despite the dominance of the pre‐war period by Arab leaders, the
increasing organization and mobilization of the Palestinian population hinted at a
resurgent Palestinian national movement even amidst the trials of dislocation.43
3.6 Palestinian Israelis: Of the newly fragmented Palestinian population, the segment that found itself in
perhaps the most conflicted position after 1948 was the Palestinians who did not flee their
homes during the war. Instead of becoming refugees, Palestinians who remained in Israel
became residents and citizens of a state, in the words of Israeli journalist and author Tom
Segev, “at war with their own people.”44 The majority of the 55,000 to 95,00045 Palestinians
remaining in Israel after 1948 lived in the Galilee and other northern regions of the
43 Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 1, 17, 29 ,32; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 145‐46; Sayigh, Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries : a people's history: 144‐45. 44 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 67. 45 The wide range of these statistics results from an Israeli census taken directly after the war in 1948. It reported that 120,000 – 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel after the war. However, 65,000 of the remaining Arabs were Bedouin living in the southern region of the Negev Desert who eschewed national identities. The majority of Bedouin either left or were driven from Israel by government policies in the decades following 1948. (Sayigh, Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries : a people's history: 93, 137.)
25
country. By 1967, the population of Palestinian Israelis had expanded to roughly 312,000
people, or twelve percent of the total Israeli population.
Despite being granted equal citizenship rights and guaranteed equality under
Israel’s founding documents,46 Palestinian Israelis faced discrimination in virtually every
aspect of their lives in the years between 1948 and 1967. The majority of Palestinian
Israelis lived in villages seventy‐five percent of which were not connected to the national
water system and seventy‐four percent of which were not connected to the national
electrical grid. Twenty percent of villages had no access roads and none of the villages had
paved streets or sewer systems. Additionally, the Israeli state confiscated over half of the
land owned by Palestinians living in Israel in the decades after 1948. One half of Palestinian
Israelis worked for Jewish bosses. Most lived in poverty, only three out of ten were insured
by the national health care system, and despite the fact that fifteen percent of students in
Israeli elementary schools were Palestinian Israeli children, the state only spent three
percent of its educational budget on Arab education. Few landlords in cities would rent
rooms to Palestinian Israelis. Furthermore, the state actively worked to prevent Palestinian
Israelis from forming political organizations for self‐representation, and in the economic
down turn of the 1960s, the unemployment rate for Palestinian Israelis was double the
Jewish unemployment rate. The main symbol and tool of the Israeli state’s treatment of
Palestinian Israelis as second‐class citizens was the subjection of Palestinian Israeli
communities to rule by martial law following 1948. To cope with the overwhelming feeling
of invisibility that accompanied being a Palestinian citizen of Israel, some Palestinian
46 See: Provisional Government of Israel, "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel," (The Knesset, 1948).
26
Israelis adopted Jewish names in order to find jobs and housing, and to fit into a society
that marginalized their existence in virtually every aspect of life.47
Prior to the 1960s, the status of Palestinian Israelis within Israeli society did not
garner much attention outside of a small circle of academics concerned with coexistence.
The small number of people who were concerned with the conditions of Palestinians living
in Israeli viewed Palestinian Israelis as a litmus test for the promises contained in Israel’s
Proclamation of Independence of “equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion, race or sex.”48 The majority of the population, however, either did
not pay attention to the social, economic, and political marginality of Palestinian Israelis, or
thought, as many of Israel’s founding political figures did based on the historical experience
of Jews, that minorities could not achieve equal rights within in a state. David Ben‐Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, articulated the position of many in Israeli society in 1950 by
saying, “these Arabs should not be living here, just as American Jews should not be living in
America.”49
However, several newspaper exposés in the mid 1960s brought to light issues of
inequality between Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens. In the ensuing years an increase
in activism inspired by the United States civil rights movement brought attention to and
sought to rectify the inferior position of Palestinians in Israeli society. As a result, the
liberal left in Israeli made bringing an end to the government of Palestinian Israelis by
martial law its main cause. Despite the eventual success of the movement in having martial
law repealed, police control replaced military control and little actually changed for
47 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 67‐70. 48 Israel, "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel." 49 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 67.
27
Palestinian Israelis. Instead, the majority of Israeli society continued to fear Palestinian
Israelis as potential spies and terrorists, and most of all, as the mothers and fathers of
future children whose high birthrate was a looming specter haunting the foundational
conception of Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. Nevertheless, awareness and
debates about the position of Palestinian Israelis in Israeli society entered the public’s
awareness in the years leading up to 1967. 50
3.7 The June 1967 War and a New Map: Despite the expectation by Israel and its Arab neighbors that another confrontation
would soon occur, the spiraling events that led to an attack by the Israeli air force on Egypt
and Syria on 5 June 1967 took actors in and observers of the Middle East by surprise.
Israel’s move to war was precipitated by the closing of the Straits of Tiran by the Egyptian
military51 and the removal of the United Nations buffer force stationed in the Sinai
peninsula at Egypt’s request.52 The majority of the fighting took place during the first four
days of the war, and by the end of the sixth day Israel had secured a decisive victory.
Between 10,000 and 15,000 Egyptian soldiers died in the six days of fighting. Syria lost
around 450 soldiers, and Jordan lost around 700 soldiers. Additionally, thousands of other
Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian soldiers sustained injuries or were captured by Israel and
held as prisoners of war. In comparison, around 800 Israeli soldiers died, over two
thousand sustained wounds, and fifteen were taken as prisoners of war. If measuring
50 Ibid. 51 The Straits of Tiran are Israel’s access point by water to the Red Sea. Israel viewed Egypt’s blockade of the Straits as an act of aggression warranting military response. (ibid., 238‐40.) 52 Parker, "The Six‐Day War: a retrospective," xv, xviii‐xix; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 17. The United Nations force was stationed in the Sinai Peninsula after the 1956 Sinai Campaign. Its mission was to provide a buffer zone between Israel and Egypt in order to dissuade hostilities. The removal of the force represented the game of brinksmanship Egypt was playing with Israel in the lead up to the war. (Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 227‐28.)
28
deaths and injuries from opposing sides of a conflict against each other is of any use in
determining the victor of a war, as opposed to its general devastation,53 then the casualty
rate of 25 to 1 in favor of Israel speaks to its upper hand in the fighting.54
Furthermore, when the rapid movement of the war came to a halt, Israel had
conquered 42,000 square miles of territory including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan
Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.55 With the new territory, Israel was three and a half times
its original size. Israel’s territorial conquest precipitated the movement of between
175,000 and 250,000 Palestinians from the West Bank into the surrounding Arab
countries. Some of the Palestinians who fled had already been displaced once in 1948 and
found themselves as refugees for a second time. However, unlike in 1948 the
overwhelming majority of majority of Palestinians did not leave the West Bank and Gaza
despite provisions made by Israel during the war to facilitate the flight of refugees from the
territories. Even with some fleeing 1.2 million Palestinians remained within the newly
conquered territories.56
3.8 The Ambiguities of Victory and Defeat: The societal and geographical impact of Israel’s victory synthesized with pre‐war
dynamics both within and between Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, and Arab societies to create
a new range of potentialities characterized by significant ambiguity and ambivalence. The
intermixing of previously separate populations in Jerusalem took place in the setting of 53 When writing about his experiences as a foreign correspondent on the frontlines covering virtually every conflict in the Middle East from the mid 1970s through the 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Robert Fisk said, “Governments… want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us,’ victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit” (Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). xviii.). 54 Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 304. 55 See appendix A.2 for a map of Israel after 1967. 56 Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 306‐07; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 404, 29.
29
uncertainty following the war as an unavoidable consequence of the de facto decision made
by Israel’s political leadership to annex the city in the days after it was conquered. The
phenomenon of crossing previously impassable borders was not restricted to Jerusalem,
but rather took place throughout the territories newly occupied by Israel. As the victors,
however, Jewish Israelis enjoyed the privilege of greater mobility than the defeated and
occupied Palestinians living in the conquered territories.
Indeed, tens of thousands of Israelis ventured into the West Bank in the weeks and
months after the war. On one day alone, more than seventy thousand Israelis visited
Hebron, and civilian visas to visit the West Bank were the most highly sought after
documents in post‐war Israel. Drawn on by a mixture of secular and religious motivations,
Israelis ventured into the West Bank to see territory and sites deeply connected to Jewish
history. From the Western Wall to the Cave of Mechpelah, Rachel’s Tomb, and Nebi Samuel,
the physical and symbolic topography of the West Bank was ripe with meanings and
memories that could easily be incorporated into existing narratives. In addition to the
religious significance, the West Bank entered into the lore of secular Zionism through the
nationalization of Jewish history and the memorializing of events such as the stand of
settlers at Gush Etzion against Jordanian soldiers in 1948.57 For some in Israeli society,
memories from the West Bank only nineteen years earlier still loomed large in their
consciousness, not as an abstract territory, but as the environment of their younger years
57 The Gush Etzion settlements were established several years prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. The settlements were located at a strategic point on the route to Jerusalem. During the 1948 war, the Arab armies attacked the settlements, and an entire Israeli military platoon was defeated on its way to try to assist the isolated settlers. The Gush Etzion settlements were forced to surrender to the Arab armies one day before the end of the war. In one of the settlements, Kfar Etzion, only four settlers survived while 127 died in the fighting. The story of the settlers’ stand against the Arab forces entered Israeli national lore as one of the foundational lessons and sacrifices of the state. (Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 170‐73.)
30
or childhood. Furthermore, in the interceding decades between 1948 and 1967 sites in the
West Bank became an occasional focus of public education, government and military
propaganda, and various other forms of media. The history and memories of the West Bank
provided the raw material for Israelis to connect with and be drawn to the territory in the
aftermath of 1967.58
While visiting the West Bank, some Israelis looked for old acquaintances from
before 1948, but the vast majority went to see the historically important sites and shop in
the Arab souks. Many Israelis adopted a gloating attitude of superiority to the Palestinians
who their army had just defeated in the war and whose living conditions they considered to
be primitive and backward. Additionally, despite the fact that the populations were coming
into contact with each other for the first time in nearly twenty years, many Israelis simply
overlooked the Palestinians living in the West Bank. The landscape they gazed upon was
not the material one before their eyes, inhabited by Palestinians, but a tapestry of national
and biblical narrative woven from contact with the West Bank’s ancient sites.59 For
instance, when Moshe Dayan visited Jericho after Israel’s victory he wrote in his journal, “It
is a wonderful city. To really see it, you have to close your eyes. Everything around the city
is dry, desolate, white as chalk, but the city is rich with gardens, stories, and legends – from
Rahab the prostitute in her window, to the Chariot of Israel and its horsemen rising up to
the heavens.”60 Instead of the actual city before his eyes, Dayan saw biblical characters and
58 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 179‐80, 424‐26. 59 Dayan’s statement echoes the sentiment and follows the narrative outlines of the nineteenth century travel writers referred to in earlier. In fact, Bashara Doumani argues that the “amazing ability [of nineteenth century Europeans] to discover the land without discovering the people dovetailed neatly with early Zionist visions” (Doumani, "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History," 8.). Dayan’s statement, then, is evidence of the persistent weight of the early narrative understanding of the land of Palestine on the discourse of the conflict. 60 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 425.
31
scenes of national significance imprinted in his mind’s eye. He was not alone. Visiting the
sites of the West Bank for most Israelis was a profoundly emotional religious and
nationalist experience, and not an encounter with the Palestinians living there.61
The strong emotions stemming from re‐connection with the historically significant
sites in the West Bank intertwined with mourning for Israel’s 800 war‐dead. However,
Israel’s rapid military victory pulled society from the depths of self‐doubt, fear, and
stagnation preceding the war and brought it to the heights of rejuvenation and self‐
confidence in its aftermath. The sense of euphoria and possibility following their military
victory was reflected in the name Israel’s political leadership chose for the war, “the Six‐
Days War,” meant to invoke the days of creation. Significantly, the name of the war
reflected the ambiguity between the secular and religious in the weeks and months
following the war. Radio broadcaster Rafi Amir captured the ambiguity in broadcast to the
Israeli public as he approached the Western Wall after Israeli troop captured Jerusalem,
“I’m not religious and never have been, but this is the Wall and I am touching the stones of
the Western Wall!”62 The Wall held no religious significance for Amir, but he was elated by
and in awe of it as a symbol of Jewish history that defied classification as either secular or
religious.63
In the environment of national and religious rejuvenation and euphoria following
the war, there was a palpable desire to hold onto the newly conquered territories. Moshe
Dayan captured the public’s sentiment when he declared, “we have returned to our holiest
61 Ibid., 429. 62 Jerold S. Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 81. 63 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 14‐16; Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East: 309.
32
of places in order to never part with them again.”64 However, the question of what to do
with the territories remained open ended in the upper echelons of the Israeli government.
In the meantime, the West Bank and Gaze Strip entered Israeli parlance as the “liberated
territories.” Both secular and religious Zionists viewed the moment after the war as an
opportunity to make whole the Jewish state by incorporating territory with tremendous
symbolic value that was at the center of the original vision of the state. Israel’s political
leadership began talking about what to do with the newly conquered territories directly
after the war ended. Israeli leaders were acutely aware of the fact that they now composed
less than a two‐thirds majority in the territory under Israel’s control. With the Palestinian
birthrate, Israelis would soon find themselves a minority in a state whose central
conception was to be Jewish and democratic. Therefore, full annexation was not an option.
However, the political leadership quickly decided that Jerusalem must be
strategically annexed into Israeli territory, and set about creating facts on the ground to
facilitate its incorporation. Also, the political leadership began weighing plans to create
settlements to annex historically significant and strategically important areas, such as the
Gush Etzion settlements evacuated in 1948, into Israeli territory. Others in the leadership
talked about holding onto the territories to use them as bartering chips in future peace
negotiations with their Arab neighbors based on pre‐1967 borders with slight territorial
adjustments. At the same time, others in the leadership thought Israel should hold onto the
territories as a source of natural resources, cheap Arab labor, and valuable real estate for
the Israeli economy. The indecision of the political leadership suspended the territories in a
state of political limbo. By essentially deciding not to adopt an official policy, the Israeli 64 Gadi Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 29.
33
government created a situation of ambiguity around the Occupied Territories that opened
up the possibility for independently motivated groups to act on the ideological attraction of
the territories in order to create their own facts on the ground.65
Meanwhile, instead of experiencing further dislocation, the war had an unforeseen
unifying effect on Palestinians. The large‐scale flight of Palestinians Israel anticipated
during the war never materialized, and for the first time in nineteen years, the majority of
Palestinians were living under the same governing entity, albeit with greatly different
statuses. Furthermore, the dislocation of more refugees and the further expansion of
Israel’s borders was another historic injustice for the Palestinians. Geographically and
emotionally unified as they had not been since the British Mandate, Palestinians turned
away from the regional Arab leaders who had twice drastically failed to deliver them from
Israeli usurpation. In place of the regional Arab powers, the pre‐war militant and political
leaders emerged as the new cadre of national leadership. Instead of the suits and
tarboushes66 of the past, the new national leadership dressed in military fatigues and
kuffiyehs. The style and actions of the new leadership symbolized a resurgent Palestinian
nationalist movement that, if nothing else, demanded Israel’s awareness of the Palestinian
people after 1967.67
The geographic and social environment after the war opened up a new array of
potential actions and a series of conflicts that have come to define the Palestinian/Israel
conflict. First, the settlement of the occupied territories by Israelis only became viable after 65 Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 21‐22; Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 85; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 424, 29. 66 A tarboush is a circular red hat worn by educated and elite members of Arab society in the nineteenth and twentieth century. 67 Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 81; Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: 89‐92.
34
the victory of 1967. Additionally, the blurring of religious and nationalist narrative
following the war created the social space in which the settlement enterprises could take
root. At the same time, however, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip
confronted Israeli society with the fact that the majority status of Jews in Israeli controlled
territory could no longer be taken for granted. Simultaneously, Palestinians experienced a
new potential for self‐assertion and action, but at the very moment that the Palestinian
living in the Occupied Territories were subjected to military occupation by the Israeli state.
Consequently, Israelis and Palestinians found themselves inhabiting contradictory realities
surrounded by major, answer‐defying questions: Jewish and democratic? Two states for
two people? One land for two people? One land for one people and not the other? The
Jewish settlement of Hebron and the establishment of NSWS took place within, and in
response to, the contradictory and ambiguous realities characterizing Israeli society
following the June 1967 War.
3.9 “Will we forget them?”: The Jewish Settlement of Hebron: Several weeks before the June 1967 War began, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook stood
before a gathering of former students from the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva. On the verge of
tears, Rabbi Kook addressed the audience, “They have divided my land. Where is our
Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem (Nablus)? And our Jericho – will
we forget them?”68 Central to Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s lament was a desire to reestablish Jewish
control over biblically significant areas of the West Bank. At the time, the sentiment of
Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s speech was far from mainstream prior to the June 1967 War. Despite the
cultivation of the West Bank as a place of longing in the collective memory of Israeli society,
68 Auerbach p. 80
35
the vast majority of Israelis, prior to June 1967, had accepted the existing borders of their
state as the boundaries of the Jewish State. 69
Rabbi Tzvi Kook, however, helped develop a theology outside the dominant
discourse of secular Zionism, yet one that would prove to be incredibly influential after the
June 1967 War. As the chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine, Kook’s
father, Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, labored to reconcile the aims of the largely secular
Zionist movement with traditional biblical and Talmudic teachings. In order to do so, Rabbi
Abraham Kook argued that although the Zionist movement was not religiously motivated,
secular Zionists were participating in a divine plan to reestablish the biblical kingdom of
Israel even though they themselves did not recognize their position in that plan. Rabbi
Abraham Kook’s interpretation opened up a space where the pioneering spirit of Zionism
and the traditional belief that the redemption of the people of Israel to the Holy Land would
only come through an act of God could coexist. As such, according to the theology of Rabbi
Abraham Kook, the establishment of the State of Israel was a stepping‐stone toward an
ideal, biblical state that would fulfill Jewish prophecy.70
Importantly, Rabbi Abraham Kook’s theology introduced human agency into the
traditional picture of redemption, and it was in this spirit that his son was speaking in the
weeks prior to the June 1967 War. However, Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s speech also illuminates a
key point of departure between his theology and that of his father. For Rabbi Tzvi Kook, the
historical land of Israel, not the establishment of a politically independent state, comprised
69 Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben‐Gurion, captured the predominant public opinion in Israel about the borders of the state in the early months of 1967. “The borders of your homeland are the borders of Israel as they are now. That is all,” Ben‐Gurion said. (Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 21.) 70 Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 38‐45; Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 26‐31.
36
the focus of redemption. Despite their intentions, the efforts of both rabbis to merge
biblical prophecy with the activities of Zionism largely failed to gain traction among
Zionists or religious Jews prior to the June 1967 War, and only really flourished among the
small number of students studying at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva.71
As a result, the students of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, who comprised the audience
of Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s speech, occupied a peculiar place in Israeli society between traditional
Orthodox sects whose attitude toward the State of Israel was indifferent at best and the
enterprise of Zionism that had claimed parts of the historic homeland of the Jewish people
and succeeded in establishing Israel as a modern state. On the one hand, the students of the
yeshiva accepted that their actions could aid in the implementation of God’s plan, which
was not accepted among the traditional Orthodox, and on the other they felt as though they
had missed their opportunity to participate in the building of the Jewish state, which had
primarily been accomplished by the settlement activities of secular Zionist pioneers. For
the students of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s speech was a call to action,
but one that only became realistic in the social and political climate after Israel’s victory in
the June 1967 War.72
One of the audience members listening to Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s speech was another
rabbi named Moshe Levinger. For Levinger, as well as others in the audience,73 the June
1967 War represented the convergence of politics and theology and an opening to play
their part in God’s plan for the redemption of the Jewish people in the land of Israel by 71 Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 80; Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 55. 72 Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 29; Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 80‐81. 73 Hanan Porat, one of the leading figures in the religious settlement movement over the forty years since 1967, was also in the audience when Rabbi Tzvi Kook gave his speech. (Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 81.)
37
settling the biblical heartland. The religiously motivated desire of Rabbi Levinger and
others to settle the Occupied Territories blended with the post‐war euphoria experienced
across Israeli society, and the widespread desire to hold onto at least some of the
conquered territory.74
Moreover, Hebron was one of the areas suspended between the euphoria of victory
and the climate of indecision about what to do with the Occupied Territories after June
1967. As the place where Abraham first purchased land when he entered Canaan, the
location of the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs, and King David’s first capital,
Hebron occupies an important position in both secular and religious memory. In many
ways, the history of Hebron is the foundation from which Jewish claims to a right of return
to their ancient homeland originated. Additionally, a community of religious Jews had been
living in Hebron since the fifteenth century, and the massacre of sixty‐seven Jewish
residents of Hebron in 1929 by Arab residents of the city and surrounding area entered
Jewish memory alongside the Eastern European pogroms of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.75
The history and historical sites of Hebron, mainly the tombs of the patriarchs and
the matriarchs, drew tens of thousands of visitors to the city after Israel’s victory in the
June 1967 War. However, the fact that Hebron was the largest population center in the
southern West Bank with thirty eight thousand Palestinian residents severely complicated
any plans for actual annexation. Yet, while the demographics of the city dissuaded the
government from making any clear decisions about Hebron’s fate, Rabbi Moshe Levinger
74 Ibid., 81, 86; Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 48‐49. 75 Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 2, 81, 86, 89; Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 578.
38
and a group of predominantly religiously motivated settlers set about creating facts on the
ground in order to bring about their own vision for Hebron’s future; a vision that was
deeply intertwined with biblical prophecy and Rabbi Tzvi Kook’s theology.76
In the spring of 1968, Rabbi Levinger, along with a group of around sixty Israelis,
obtained a permit from the Israeli military authority governing the West Bank to celebrate
Passover in Hebron. Posing as Swiss tourists, the group rented rooms at the Park Hotel in
Hebron for the week of Passover. However, when the group arrived they brought washing
machines and refrigerators with them and nailed mezuzahs to the doors of their rooms in
anticipation of the long duration of their stay. The morning after the group’s arrival,
Levinger and the others took to the streets dancing, singing, and carrying Torah scrolls.
After the holiday, the group refused to leave the Park Hotel asserting that Jews had a right
to settle in the ancient, holy city.77
Six weeks after they first arrived, the Israeli army removed the group of settlers
from the Park Hotel and brought them to an army barracks overlooking the city. In the
barracks, families shared two room apartments and young men and women each slept in
separate crowded dormitories. Despite the trying conditions, the group persisted and the
military gradually constructed more permanent dwellings for the Settlers at the barracks.
The Israeli military and government reacted to the Settlers with marked ambivalence. On
the one hand, they did not want to allow the Settlers to occupy a position in the center of a
Palestinian city, but on the other Israeli military and government action allowed the
Settlers to remain in the West Bank.
76 Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel. 77 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 578; Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 145; Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 90‐91.
39
Eventually, the government developed a compromise proposal. Instead of settling in
the heart of a Palestinian city, the government offered to construct a community for the
Settlers on a hill over looking Hebron.78 The Settlers accepted the proposal as a temporary
measure in order to ensure their continued presence in the West Bank and their proximity
to Hebron and its holy sites. The Israeli government constructed the community, named
Kiryat Arba after the name of biblical Hebron, using money from their public works budget.
Upon its completion, around one hundred and fifty settlers moved into the new settlement.
However, many of the Settlers continued to hold aspirations of establishing a Jewish
presence in the center of Hebron. In 1979, Miriam Levinger, Rabbi Levinger’s wife, led a
group of women from Kiryat Arba into Hebron and occupied the historically significant
Hadassah House. The actions of Miriam Levinger and the other women succeeded in
establishing a Jewish presence in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian city and
creating the contours of the current conflict in Hebron. The establishment of both Kiryat
Arba and Jewish settlement within the city of Hebron resulted from a conscientious effort
by the Hebron settlers to transform the landscape of the West Bank in order to bring about
the biblically inspired reality they desired in the aftermath of the June 1967 War.
Importantly, in order to achieve their objectives the Settlers played on the blending of
nationalist and religious narrative in the post‐war environment and the accompanying
political ambiguity that surrounded to future of the Occupied Territories.79 Paradoxically,
at the same time as Rabbi Levinger and the Jewish settlers of Hebron were working to 78 The community on the hills overlooking Hebron was not the only settlement being built with support from the Israeli government and military at the time. Construction at Kfar Etzion began less than six months after the end of the June 1967 War. (Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 170‐73.) 79 Segev, 1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East: 579; Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 146; Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 90‐95.
40
secure a foothold in Hebron, another group of pioneers was attempting to establish a
project with a much different vision and purpuse.
3.10 The Sons of Abraham: Establishing Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam: Like Hebron, the idea for NSWS emerged from the events defining the post‐war
environment within Israel. However, instead of emanating from the socially pervasive
sense of euphoria, NSWS was a response to the conflicts resulting from the monumental
geographic and demographic shifts following the June 1967 War. Prior to the war, Bruno
Hassar, the visionary behind the founding of the village, hoped to start an interfaith
community primarily for Jews and Christians living in Israel. After June 1967, however, it
became impossible for Hussar to imagine a village built on the ideals of peace and co‐
existance between Christians and Jews within Israel “without taking into account those
other sons of Abraham, the Arabs, both Muslim and Christian.”80
Hussar’s involvement in interfaith and intergroup peace and co‐existence work
stemmed from his own cosmopolitan and culturally mixed background. Born in Egypt in
1911 to Jewish parents, Hussar also held Hungarian and Italian citizenship. As a young
man, he moved to France where he converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. During World
War Two, Hussar fled to the Free Zone in France where he witnessed anti‐Semitism first
hand, which sensitized him to his own Jewish roots. After the war, he studied theology and
philosophy and was ordained as a priest in 1950. With encouragement from his mentor,
Hussar moved to Israel in the 1950s in order to help the Catholic Church establish a center
for Jewish studies in Jerusalem. Hussar’s activities in Israel were part of an effort to
reconcile Christians and Jews in light of the historic role Christian theology played in
80 Feuerverger, Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a JewishPalestinian Village in Israel: 122.
41
paving the way to the Holocaust.81 It was in the setting of post‐holocaust reconciliation
efforts between Christians and Jews within Israel that Hussar developed the initial vision
for an interfaith village where people could, according to Hussar, come to “break down the
barriers of fear, mistrust, ignorance, [and] preconceived ideas… and build bridges of trust,
respect, mutual understanding, and, if possible, friendship.”82
However, the June 1967 War fundamentally altered the setting in which Hussar was
living and working. According to Hussar, with the unification of Jerusalem, “suddenly the
Arab world busts into the city’s everyday life.”83 While the majority of Israeli society
relished the rejuvenation that followed victory, the geographic and demographic shifts
resulting from the war, for Hussar, brought the previously nearly invisible position of
Palestinians living in Israel into sharp focus, as well as the broader conflict between Israelis
and Palestinians. As a result, it became impossible for Hussar to imagine a village working
for peace and co‐existence within Israel without the conflict between Palestinians and
Israelis being its central focus. As such, after June 1967, Hussar’s vision shifted to the
establishment of a village where Israelis and Palestinians of all faiths could live together
equally while working through the conflicts between them and teaching their societies
about peace.84
Once the vision for the village crystallized, the major question that remained was
how Hussar and others working on the project could obtain land so that the dream for the
village could be turned into a reality. The question of land was answered in 1972 when the
81 Ibid., 120‐23. 82 Ibid., 119‐20. 83 Ibid., 121. 84 Ibid., 121‐22.
42
Trappist monastery at Latrun85 offered to lease a hilltop to the project at a nominal price
for a one hundred year period. The hill had been part of the demilitarized zone between
Jordan and Israel prior to the June 1967 War.86 Shortly after obtaining the hilltop, the
group held its first meeting on the future site of NSWS. The meeting took place, according
to Hussar, “in an atmosphere of simple friendship… We were joined by Bedouin encamped
around us, and by Arabs and Jews from surrounding villages and kibbutzim.”87
Initially, however, conditions on the hilltop were difficult. Bramble covered the land,
which had not been cultivated for centuries. Also, the hill did not have running water,
bathrooms, or a shower. The early devotees to the project who lived on the hill had to dig
holes in the ground for toilets and piled into cars once a week to drive to a nearby kibbutz
to shower. Additionally, at first the project attracted young people from around the world
who were looking for better societies than the ones they left, but who were not particularly
interested in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. For the village to be successful,
Hussar reasoned, it would have to attract Palestinians and Israelis to come live there.
Living in a tent in the trying conditions on the hilltop, Hussar began to doubt
whether the project could succeed. However, in a major breakthrough for the village, a
Swiss family who had heard about the NSWS on the nightly news donated money for
bathrooms and sent an architect to help build them. Soon after a group of Germans started
an association to raise money for the project and helped connect the village to the natural
85 Established in the late 19th century, the Trappist Monastary in Latrun, Israel is home to French monks whose order is founded on the “principle of working for peace in God’s name.” (ibid., 141.) 86 Ibid., 122‐23. 87 Ibid., 123.
43
water supply on the hill. However, the vision truly began to become a reality in 1978 when
the first family moved to the hilltop, initiating a new era in NSWS’s development.88
3.11 Contrasting legacies: The early pioneers of NSWS succeeded in carving out a niche on a hill located in the
ambiguous territory of the pre‐1967 border between the West Bank and Israel. There they
built a village whose purpose is to work to transform the landscape of conflict between
Palestinians and Israelis. Importantly, the project took shape within the setting of, and in
response to, the seismic territorial and demographic transformations following the June
1967 War, which brought the conflict and inequalities between Israelis and Palestinians
into sharp focus for individuals, like Bruno Hussar, who were interested in issues of peace
and co‐existence. At the same time, the Jewish settlement of Hebron took root in the post‐
war environment, though appealing to very different trends. The actions of a group of
religiously motivated settlers succeed in establishing a small Jewish presence among a
much larger Palestinian population. In order to do so, the Settlers took advantage of
popular and political sentiment following the June 1967 War to advance their aim of
establishing Jewish control over what they considered the biblical and historical heartland
of the Jewish people.
As seen in chapter one, the legacy of the Hebron settlers and NSWS pioneers is
vastly different in terms of the characteristics of space and relations between peoples that
developed as a result of their actions. In order to explore the differences between the effect
of each community on its setting, the following three sections focus on the ways the
respective communities narrate belonging and identity, its implications for relations
88 Ibid., 2, 124‐27.
44
between Palestinians and Israelis within each setting, and the position of each approach
within the broader context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
45
4.0 Narratives of Hebron’s Jewish Settlers:
4.1 Hebron: A Space of Conflict: Hebron is a space of conflict. Daily dramas that range from the now banal humiliations of
checkpoints to protests, violent confrontations, imprisonments, and even deaths play out
between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, Palestinians and the Israeli military, and even
between Jewish settlers and the Israeli military. Undergirding the tensions and hostilities in
Hebron are a series of assertions about belonging made by the Jewish settlers that
constitute the heart of a contest over Israel’s identity as a state and the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict since June 1967. Moreover, the consequences of the assertions and actions of
Jewish settlers in Hebron illuminate the challenges brought about by the construction of
monolithic ethno‐religious national identities in the heterogeneous space of
Israel/Palestine. Specifically, through their narratives, the Hebron settlers attempt to
impose static and homogeneous understandings of history, belonging, memory, and ‘the
other’ on a fundamentally dynamic and plural space. As such, the Settlers’ narrative
identity is constructed in opposition to Palestinian residents of the city. This construction
precludes any basis for interaction between Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers other
than antagonism and the recapitulation of structures of dispossession, exploitation, and
oppression that characterize the conflict overall.
4.2 History, Belonging, Memory, and the Other in Jewish Hebron: Since the beginning of the settlement movement, the Jewish settlers of Hebron have
undertaken to define their community identity as well as its position in relation to Israeli
46
society as a whole, the Palestinian people amongst whom they live, and the broader
geopolitical environment that constitutes the macro setting of their activities. For the
Settlers, the narration of identity is a highly political endeavor. They are simultaneously
arguing for the continuity of their actions with the history of Zionist settlement in Israel,
the illegitimacy of the Palestinian people, and the settlement’s location as a vanguard of the
Western world against the rising tide of political Islam in the East. In order to make their
claims, the Jews of Hebron recently issued two commemorative texts. The first, Hebron:
4000 Years & 40 by Noam Arnon, a settler in the old city of Hebron, was published in 2008
to mark the fortieth anniversary of Jewish return to Hebron, and the second, Hebron:
Rebirth from Ruin, is a collection of essays by settlers and their supporters published in
2009 to mark the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 massacre. Both books are co‐published
by the Jewish Community of Hebron and an outside supporting institution. Additionally,
both books are available on the Jewish community of Hebron’s website89 and translated
into English from their original Hebrew. Together, the texts provide a narrative of the
Settlers’ conceptions of history, belonging, memory, and the ‘other’ around which the
identity of the settlement community is formed.
To begin with, the Settlers’ narrative roots the history of Hebron in two foundational
events that divide the city between its pre‐modern and modern periods. The first event is
God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis that “unto your children shall I give this land,”90 and
Abraham’s subsequent purchase of a field as a burial site for his wife Sarah, which now
holds the building covering the tomb of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs. According to the
narrative, God’s promise and Abraham’s land purchase form the “root and precedent of all 89 "Hebron, City of Patriarchs: The Jewish Community of Hebron," http://www.hebron.com/english/. 90 Hebron: Rebirth from Ruins, (Jewish Community of Hebron, 2009). 108.
47
subsequent Jewish purchases and reclamations of land in Eretz Israel.”91 In other words, all
claims for the Jewish peoples right to return to their historic homeland emanate from this
foundation. Consequently, the fact that Hebron was the first Jewish possession in the Land
of Israel positions the city, according to the Settlers, as “the nation’s cradle,”92 and therefore
central to the nation’s past, present, and future. Moreover, the centrality of Hebron has
been reinforced over time by the fact that the city was King David’s first capital, and
continued to be a place of longing, pilgrimage, and residence for Jews in the millennia of
Diaspora spanning between the destruction of the Second Temple and the present.
The continuity of Jewish presence in Hebron, the narrative continues, was only
disrupted in 1929 by the massacre of the Jewish community at the hands of their Arab
neighbors. The Settlers, and Israeli society‐at‐large, understand the massacre to have been
a “European‐style pogrom,”93 and thereby connect the violence to the trajectory of
European anti‐Semitism that led to the Holocaust. In the parlance of the Settlers, the
massacre rendered Hebron “’judenrein’94 until its liberation in 1967.”95 After the massacre,
according to community member Rehavan Zeevi, the city of the Patriarchs and the
Matriarchs was left in the hands of “Jew‐murderers who could now pillage the houses and
homes of those they had slaughtered and killed.”96 The slaughter inaugurated the modern
history of the city, which consists of the Settlers’ struggle to reestablish and maintain the
historical continuity of Jewish presence in Hebron in the face of forces bent on their
annihilation. Consequently, the Settlers view themselves as having God‐given, legal, and
91 Noam Arnon, Hebron: 4000 Years and 40 (The Jewish Community of Hebron, 2008). 11. 92 Ibid. 93 Hebron: Rebirth from Ruins. 6. 94 “Judenrein” is the term used by Nazis to indicate areas cleansed of Jews during World War Two. 95 Hebron: Rebirth from Ruins. 63. 96 Ibid., 55.
48
moral mandates to resurrect a Jewish community whose continuity throughout history,
only broken by an act of anti‐Semitic slaughter, forms the basis of Jewish claims of
belonging in the Holy Land.
In order to bolster their claims of belonging in Hebron, the Settlers emphasize the
presence of the tombs of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs, and depict Jewish presence as
the constant throughout the city’s history. To abandon the city, David Wilder argues in one
essay, “would be tantamount to abandoning the founders of our people,” and analogous to
giving up “Philadelphia or Boston or Mt. Vernon to the Taliban or al Qaeda.”97 As the
ancestral home of their forefathers, the logic maintains, Hebron is a, if not the, natural place
for Jews to live and control. Moreover, the Settlers are only following in the millennia old
tradition of Jews who have made Hebron their home in order to live close to and be able to
pray by the graves of the ancestors of their people. Indeed, Jewish presence in the city has
remained constant throughout the ages, according to the narrative, while the presence of
others has been transient. As Kiryat Arba resident and history teacher Eliaou Attlan writes,
the walls of the building above the graves of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs, built by
Herod around 150 B.C.E, have been a “silent witness to many great conquerors… If the
stones could speak, they would testify to how the conquerors disappeared, while the
people of Israel outlived them all.”98 The Jewish communities claims of belonging in
Hebron, then, are reaffirmed in the Settlers’ narrative as natural, constant, and beyond
question.
Additionally, the Settlers’ community is constructed as a community of memory
living in the light of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs and the shadows of 1929 and the 97 Ibid., 115. 98 Ibid., 16.
49
Holocaust. The shared memories of these events constitute the locus around which the
community coalesces. While moving about the city the Settlers are not only coming into
contact with their immediate physical environs, but also, according to community member
Yeonatan Freide, “walking along the same paths that the Matriarchs and Patriarchs…
walked along in their day.”99 Freide continues, “this knowledge is the driving force in our
lives in Hebron.”100 The community, following the narrative, is constituted as a kind of
wrinkle in time. Accordingly, the biblical and the present exist side by side, along with
every interstitial generation of Jews who have lived in the city, and the living in
simultaneity with past forms the common fabric of life for the Settlers.
Additionally, the memories of the 1929 massacre and the Holocaust form both a
cautionary tale and a call to action for the community. Rachel Suissa writes, “the memory of
the pogrom martyrs should forever be with us, and remembering them will contribute to a
better future.”101 Remembering the victims becomes increasingly important for the Settlers
over time because the fate of the martyrs, the Settlers believe, will become their fate if they
are not successful in establishing the permanence and security of their community.
Moreover, Suissa continues, the actions of the Settlers are “a dignified and appropriate step
towards laying to rest the memory of the barbaric European and Arab pogroms
culminating in the Holocaust.”102 Evidently, the Settlers view themselves to be the heirs of
the victims of the most severe crime of the twentieth century, and their right to be in
Hebron is restitution for the suffering and slaughter of their forbearers. As such, the shared
99 Ibid., 120.; Also, note the resonance of Friede’s statement with Dayan’s description of Jericho and the writings of nineteenth century Europeans about their encounters with the Holy Land. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 8. 102 Ibid., 98.
50
memory of suffering and injustice defines the moral location of the Settlers’ endeavors and
constitutes a common reference point around which their identity is formed in relation to
the outside world.
The Settlers’ right to be in Hebron, according to the narrative, is under assault by the
Palestinians who threaten to push them from their historic place in the city. Indeed, the
Palestinians are depicted as an illegitimate people heir to the legacy of violence and anti‐
Semitism that plagued the Jews in the twentieth century and before. The word ‘Palestinian’
is conspicuously absent from the Settlers’ texts except in reference to the Palestinian
Authority. In all other instances, the Palestinian residents of Hebron are referred to as
Arabs, indistinguishable from those living in neighboring countries. In essence, for the
Settlers the Palestinians are an “invented” people belonging to a “false creation called a
‘palestinian nation [sic].’”103 Palestinians are folded by the Settlers’ narrative into the ranks
of usurpers who have tried, and failed, to displace the Jews from Hebron and erase the
Jewish character of the city over the ages. Palestinians are not a real people, the narrative
contends, and therefore cannot have a real claim to the city. Arabs, however, should be
allowed to live in the city provided they recognize that it is the God‐given property of the
Jews. Therefore, any belonging Palestinians may claim to Hebron is illegitimate compared
to the divine, moral, and historic sanctioning of Jewish presence.
On top of their illegitimacy, the Palestinian population of Hebron is construed as an
existential threat to the Settlers, as well as to Israel and the Western world, by connecting it
to the legacy of the 1929 massacre. As Noam Arnon writes, the Palestinians currently living
103 Ibid., 12.
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in Hebron are the “Arab offspring of the perpetrators of the 1929 massacre.”104 The good
action of a few Arabs, who “it must be admitted… from among a murderous population of
many thousands, did conceal and rescue some Jews,”105 are subsumed in the much greater
memory of violence that marks the massacre.106 Following in the footsteps of their
predecessors, according to the Settlers, the contemporary Palestinian community is
capable of visiting extreme violence on the Jews living in Hebron without provocation or
warning. Indeed, the slew of terrorist attacks and persistent violence suffered by the
Settlers testifies to the continued wish of the Arabs of Hebron to “make Hebron
judenrein”107 once again. Furthermore, according to the narrative, the current terrorist
activities of Palestinians are not just a threat to Jewish settlers in Hebron, or Israel at large,
but are also part of the wave of Islamic terror directed against the Western World. As such,
Arnon states, “the miraculous rebirth of the Jewish community of Hebron… is the single
greatest triumph of the West over Islamic Jihad and terror.”108
The depiction of barbarous Palestinians in the Settlers’ narrative exists rather
disjointedly with the memory of good relations between Arabs and Jews and the Settlers’
wishes for future peace. Arnon recalls, “Jews and Arabs had inhabited the town for many
generations, at times in peaceful coexistence and as good neighbors.”109 The past existence
104 Arnon, Hebron: 4000 Years and 40: 33. 105 Ibid., 23. 106 In his book One Country: A bold proposal to end the IsraeliPalestinian impasse, Ali Abunimah offers an alternative narrative to the 1929 massacre. Abunimah notes that the memory of the massacre is one of Israel’s foundational myths, and is often used by supporters of the settlement movement to argue for the aggressive expansion of settlements in Hebron and the imposition of military control. However, Abunimah states that most members of the Jewish community of Hebron, as survivors of the massacre testified, were saved because their Muslim neighbors sheltered them and cared for the wounded. “How would history look today,” Abunimah asks, “had that been the signal lesson of the event?” (Ali Abunimah, One country: a bold proposal to end the IsraeliPalestinian impasse (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). 7.) 107 Hebron: Rebirth from Ruins. 8. 108 Arnon, Hebron: 4000 Years and 40: 2. 109 Ibid., 21.
52
of peaceful relations sets a possible precedent for future coexistence. However, the
memory of neighborly relations also mixes with that of the 1929 massacre to form a
specter of violence and ill‐intent lurking just below the surface of cordiality. Additionally,
the Settlers’ prayer that “the children of Abraham will one day be able to live in Hebron in
peace, side by side, in serenity and harmony,”110 sits awkwardly with the depiction of
Palestinian terrorists emboldened by every concession for peace. The Settlers’ narrative
concludes that strengthening the ability of the Jewish community in Hebron, and Israel as a
whole, to protect itself, instead of emboldening the enemy by giving away God‐given Jewish
territory, is the necessary strategy for preventing Hebron from becoming “judenrein” once
again. Moreover, the Settlers’ maintain that there is an intrinsic link between the
reinforcement of Jewish control over Hebron and the protection of Israel from the
omnipresent threat of annihilation.
Therefore, through their narration of history, memory, belonging, and the other, the
Jewish settlers of Hebron constitute their identity as a community exercising its God‐give,
legal, and moral right to live in the city of its forefathers while communing between the
material present and the omnipresent past. The formation of the Settlers’ identity around
collective memories of the biblical past establishes the community as a pillar of stasis in a
constantly reconfiguring world. However, the outpost of stasis, that is the continuation of
Jewish presence in the city through the Settlers’ community, is being encroached upon by
illegitimate claims of belonging made by an invented people. Consequently, while praying
for peace, the Settlers’ must form an ever‐vigilant bulwark, living in the shadow of the 1929
110 Hebron: Rebirth from Ruins. 9.
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massacre and the Holocaust, against the omnipresent threat of annihilation faced by the
Jewish people.
4.3 The Hebron Settlers in Israeli Society: In the view of many in Israeli society, the Hebron settlers’ formulation of identity
and belonging places them considerably outside the mainstream. The Settlers’ actions and
assertions following June 1967 War, according to this view, form one extreme in an
internal conflict over Israel’s identity as a state. The main thrust of political Zionism,
according Attalia Omer, “rejected traditional Jewish notions of messianic redemption and
insisted on the physical human‐initiated redemption or act of return to the land.”111 As
such, the dominant Zionist culture in Israel adheres to Anthony Smith’s characterization of
nationalism as a “distinctly this‐worldly movement and culture.”112 It was precisely in
response to the “this‐worldliness” of political Zionism that Rabbi Abraham Kook developed
his theology in order to enable religious participation in the physical act of land
redemption as a stepping‐stone towards divine redemption. The point of departure
pertaining to the significance of land, noted in chapter two, between father and son’s
theology forms the point of contention between the religious Zionist settlers and the
secular Zionist mainstream.
By insisting on their right to settle the entire God‐given land of Israel, the Settlers
have forced a confrontation between the twin foundational conceptions of Israel as a
Jewish and as a democratic state. The June 1967 War, according to Israeli scholar Gadi
Taub, “presented Israel with two possible interpretation of Zionism: Zionism as the
111 Atalia Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice," Political Theology 11, no. 5 (2010): 661. 112 Ibid.
54
liberation of people and Zionism as the redemption of land.”113 Siding with the Settlers,
Taub continues, “would force Israel to make a choice between two options, both of which
will be an end to Zionism: a Jewish apartheid, where the Arab majority is barred from
voting, and a democracy where the Jewish character of the state would be voted down by
the Arab majority.”114 The Settlers, however, do not view their actions as problematic.
Again, influenced by Rabbi Abraham Kook’s theology, the Settlers believe that the coming
redemption, which their actions are helping to facilitate, will “solve the dilemma of the
occupation at a metaphysical level.”115Since the religious narrative of redemption put
forward by the Settlers is rejected by the mainstream of Israeli society and the Jewish and
democratic nature of the state are valued as essential, the Settlers are demonized and
ostracized as a fringe group, in the words of Israeli academic Michael Feige, “deeply
entangled in… processes undermining the unique Jewish character of the state.”116
However, the characterization of Hebron’s settlers as on the ideological fringe of
Israel society is made problematic when juxtaposed with the relative success of their
movement in the four decades since 1967. The small group of settlers who celebrated
Passover in the Park Hotel in 1968 has now become, according to Feige, “200,000 settlers
in 145 settlements, whose representation by ministers and members of the Knesset far
surpassed their percentage in the Israeli population.”117 Moreover, the settlement
enterprise in Hebron, and elsewhere, has survived because the Israeli state “enabled them,
backed them, partly financed them, and took international responsibility for their
113 Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 3. 114 Ibid., 13. 115 Ibid., 9. 116 Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 7. 117 Ibid., 10.
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actions.”118 By monopolizing on the ambivalent social and political attitudes toward the
Occupied Territories after 1967, the Settlers have been largely able to determine Israeli
policy towards the West Bank over the past four decades, and have exerted a degree of
influence over the debates and actions of society as whole uncharacteristic of a groups at
its margins.119
Furthermore, Taub’s clear distinction between a Zionism focused on land and a
Zionism focused on political emancipation is challenged by a critical consideration of
ethno‐religious nationalism and the history of Zionism. Omer argues that nationalist
symbols and myths are often continuations of religious motifs transmitted to a secular
setting.120 However, placing these myths and symbols in the secular setting of nationalism
does not severe them from their religious roots, as much as secular nationalist would like
to suppress their origins. Instead, nationalist symbols and narratives exist as a hybrid
“political theology.” As a result, according to Omer, “Jewish ‘return’ is interpreted as
historical rather than religious metahistorical entitlement and the Jewish character of the
state of Israel as a ‘cultural’ attribute and imperative.”121 Even in its secular form, the
political theology of mainstream Zionism pulls on the same shared sense of history,
belonging, memory, and the other as the Hebron settlers’ ideology, but places them in the
context of redemption in this world rather than the divine. The reliance of secular Zionism
on the religious resources of Judaism is clearly demonstrated throughout the history of the
Zionist movement and the State of Israel, as evidenced by the blending of nationalist and
118 Ibid., 12. 119 Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 15. 120 Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice," 661‐62. 121 Ibid., 665.
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religious symbolism and myth in the aftermath of June 1967 War.122 Even when it has tried,
such as during the Sixth Zionist World Congress,123 political Zionism has not been able to
“ignore the centrality of the Land of Israel for Jewish identity.”124 However, due to its “this‐
world” orientation, since it has already achieved its goal of national self‐determination,
political Zionism is able to make political calculations about the material consequences of
annexation that do not factor into the worldview of the Settlers.
Therefore, the Settlers are marginal in Israeli society due to their divine, rather than
worldly, orientation towards redemption which leads them to value land reclamation
above the Jewish or democratic nature of the state. The different orientations towards
redemption between secular Zionism and the religious Zionism of the Settlers have formed
a major point of contention in Israeli society since June 1967. During the same time, the
Settlers have been able to exert disproportionate influence over Israeli policy in the
Occupied Territories, strongly influencing the contours of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Additionally, despite the differences between religious and secular Zionism, both sides in
the debate draw on a shared heritage of symbols and narratives, albeit in different
contexts, to constitute their collective identities around senses of history, belonging,
122 Recall Israeli radio broadcaster Rafi Amir’s elation on approaching the Western Wall after Israel occupied the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. “I am not religious and never have been,” Amir said, “but this is the Wall and I am touching the stones of the Western Wall!” (Auerbach, Hebron Jews: memory and conflict in the land of Israel: 81.). 123 During the Sixth World Zionist Congress in 1903, Theodore Herzl introduced a proposal to send a committee to British controlled Uganda in East Africa to explore the possibility of establishing Jewish settlements in the territory. The proposal stemmed from a letter written by Sir Clement Hill, the chief of the Protectorate Department of the British Colonial Office, suggesting that the British government would support Jewish national settlement in Uganda. Although Herzl made clear that Uganda was a political consideration and not a substitute for Palestine, the proposal was met with strong resistance because settlement in Uganda appeared to forfeit what members of the congress viewed as the intrinsic link between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Disagreement over the proposal almost caused a split in the movement, and the idea of establishing a Jewish national settlement in Uganda was rejected by the Seventh World Zionist Congress in 1904. (Walter Laqueur, A history of Zionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972). 127‐31.) 124 Taub, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism: 31.
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memory, and the other. As a result, in regards to the position of the ‘other’, the Settlers and
Israeli society in general share a great deal in terms of their formulation of and adherence
to exclusionary narratives of identity and belonging.
4.4 Narratives of Irreconcilable Difference: As a result of their exclusivist narration of history, belonging, and memory, the
Settlers’ form their identity around, in the words of Couze Venn, “an intransigent history of
difference dividing communities into apparently irreconcilable ethnic and religious, or
‘civilizational’ camps.”125 Consequently, the difference between the Settlers and
Palestinians is considered to be “originary and irreconcilable.”126 Furthermore, the
recapitulation of monolithic stereotypes contained in the Settlers’ discourse develops the
Palestinians as an imaginary, or a comprehensive and representative mental image. The
Settlers’ mental image of Palestinians essentializes them as an ‘evil’ foil for the Settlers’
‘good’ community. Additionally, the totalized construction of the Palestinians as an
existential threat to the Settlers’ community in internalized by the Settlers and
“performatively enacted and embodied in face to face situations.”127 The essentialist
formulation of the Settlers’ narrative shuts down the inherent openness of social actions to
the introduction of newness that could challenge or enrich existing frameworks of
understanding, and blocks any knowledge of the Palestinians outside of the Settlers
developed imaginary. As a result, the Palestinians are relegated to “the incomprehension of
an alien lifeworld, in spite of the common world often shared.”128
125 Couze Venn, "The Repetition of Violence: Dialogue, the Exchange of Memory, and the Question of Convivial Socialities," Social Identities 11, no. 3 (2005): 283. 126 Ibid., 284. 127 Ibid., 287. 128 Ibid., 286.
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The essentialization of Palestinians in the Settlers’ narratives reinforces the
homogenizing imperative underlying the current status quo and leaves no room for what
cultural theorist Homi Bhabha refers to as the “fluidity, elasticity, and historicity of
identities.”129 In other words, the Settlers’ narrative flattens what Venn refers to as the
historically and contemporary “heterogeneous, hyphenated culture space… of
Palestine/Israel”130 into an “immutable identity, untranslatable to the ‘other’, who is
positioned as the outsider.”131 By flattening the historically pluralistic space of
Israel/Palestinian into an unprecedented stasis, the Settlers’ narrative eliminates the
common ground necessary for translating experiences between the two communities in
Hebron. Furthermore, the essentializing narrative serves to perpetuate the conflict by
adhering to the ideological needs of the Settlers, and obscuring the experiences of
dispossession, exploitation, and oppression underlying the conflict. As a consequence, the
communities become locked in a cycle of violence construed as a civilizational conflict with
no way to attend to the actually root causes of the violence.132
Importantly, however, the Settlers’ construction of identity and belonging
illuminates only one half of the conflict in Hebron. The voices and experiences of
Palestinians living in the city, which aim at defining their own position, form a necessary
companion to the Settlers’ narratives. The perspectives of Palestinians in Hebron, though,
are much more difficult to uncover than their Jewish counterparts. The following section
129 Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice," 663. 130 Venn, "The Repetition of Violence: Dialogue, the Exchange of Memory, and the Question of Convivial Socialities," 295. 131 Ibid., 291. 132 Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories; Venn, "The Repetition of Violence: Dialogue, the Exchange of Memory, and the Question of Convivial Socialities."; Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice."
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investigates the historically constructed difficulties surrounding Palestinian self‐
presentation and engages with the experiences and voices that end up being heard.
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5.0 The Problematic of Palestinian Self-Presentation:
5.1 Who will speak for the Palestinians? Unlike the Jewish settlers of Hebron, there are no self‐published memorial or history books
available in English representing the outlook and experiences of Palestinian residents of
the city. Instead, the narratives of Hebron’s Palestinian residents are largely available to
those outside the Arabic language community, if they are to be heard at all, through the
mediation of Western or Israeli researchers, filmmakers, and human rights organizations.
The reliance of Palestinians living in Hebron on outsiders to translate or deliver their
stories to the outside world is a result of the historical and persistent representation of
Palestinians as an illegitimate people. In the dominant discourse of the West, according to
Edward Said, “there is the entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians deriving from
age‐old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient. This attitude…
dehumanized us, reduced us to the barely tolerated status of a nuisance.”133 In other words,
the dominant Western cultural narrative of Palestinians has evolved from, and follows the
basic outlines of, nineteenth century European writings about the Holy Land, addressed
above in chapter one. As a result, Palestinians living today inherit the sense of illegitimacy
constructed around their ancestors, and continue to be understood according to
modernized renditions of the same discourse.
Furthermore, for the majority of the twentieth century, outsiders who acted as self‐
appointed spokespeople for the Palestinians developed the image of Palestinians as an
133 Edward W. Said, The question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). xl.
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illegitimate people in the eyes of the western world. Importantly, the self‐appointed
spokespeople filtered the knowledge they relayed through cultural perspectives and
political agendas external to those of Palestinians. Most of the time, moreover, Zionists and
Westerners aligned with the Zionist cause assumed the role of speaking for the
Palestinians. Since the interests of Zionism ran directly contrary to Palestinian interest,
according to Said, “this has always meant a blocking operation, by which the Palestinian
cannot be heard from (or represent himself) directly on the world stage.”134 As a result,
according to Dina Matar, “the story of the Palestinians, as ordinary human beings subjected
to violent forms of power, remains a largely hidden one.”135 Put another way, Palestinians
have not been heard from directly for much of the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict
because their identity and experiences are delegitimized and obscured in the process of
justifying their dispossession, domination, and control.136
5.2 Recovering Palestinian Voices: Far from being greeted with acquiescence, the historically imposed muteness of
Palestinians in Western discourse inspired a counter literature that sought to enable
Palestinian voices to speak to their own experiences for broader audiences. Specifically, the
literature endeavored to expand Western understandings of Palestinians beyond the
delegitimizing claims that characterized the pervasively available narratives. To this extent,
Rosemary Sayigh’s Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries: A Peoples History,
published in 1979, is a landmark text that uses oral history techniques to present a peoples
134 Ibid., 39. 135 Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: xi. 136 Said, The question of Palestine: 29, 37‐39.; Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: xi.
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perspective of Palestinian history through the voices of refugees living in Lebanon.137
According to Matar, whose What it Means to Be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian
Peoplehood follows in the tradition of Sayigh’s work, the purpose of Palestinian people’s
histories is to “ascribe agency to the Palestinians, not as helpless victims of forces beyond
their control, as they have often been portrayed, but as actors at the centre of critical
phases of their modern history.”138 However, while Palestinian voices, experiences, and
agency take a central position in works by authors such as Sayigh and Matar, the central
problematic of Palestinian self‐presentation remains: Palestinians, historically and
contemporarily, are so marginalized a people that their stories must be related to outsiders
by third parties who hold the credibility Palestinians lack.
As such, the narratives of Palestinian experience and outlook in Hebron available to
outsiders are filtered through the legitimizing frameworks of Western,139 or Western
trained, academics, filmmakers, institutions, and human rights organizations. Despite
presenting Palestinian voices and experiences that would otherwise be unheard, the
available narratives are not immune to manipulation by the perspectives and political
agendas of the individuals and organizations undertaking to broadcast Palestinian voices to
a larger audience. For instance, Israeli human rights group B’tselem started a video project
in 2007 to document harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. One of
the places the project focuses on is Hebron’s Old City center. According to B’tselem, “the
project is unique in that it enables Palestinians themselves to document the infringement of
137 Sayigh, Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries : a people's history. 138 Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: xi. 139 In this case, Western refers both to European, North American, and Israeli academics, filmmakers, and organizations, as, despite its location in the Middle East, Israel is closely associated with the West.
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their rights and to present their daily lives, their anger, pain, joy, and hope to Israelis.”140
However, the videos that end up on B’tselem’s website are presented to bolster B’Tselem’s
goal of raising awareness about human rights violations against Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories in order to change Israeli policy.141
For example, one video from the project shows a number of shops along a crowded
street. The video then cuts to a group of Israeli soldiers in combat gear filtering into the
street and disrupting the commercial activities taking place. The soldiers drag a number of
Palestinians away from the shops pushing them to the ground and subduing them when
they resist. One man is carried out from a shop by four soldiers and placed on the ground,
apparently unconscious. As the press gathers around to take pictures, the soldiers cordon
off the area and begin to weld the doors of the shops along the street closed. The caption
accompanying the video informs the viewer, “The action was part of the Israeli authorities'
separation policy in the center of Hebron, which is aimed at protecting settlements erected
there. This policy entails physical and legal segregation between the Israeli settlers and the
Palestinian majority.”142 The video clearly depicts the disregard for Palestinian rights by
Israeli authorities. However, the video is presented primarily to persuade Israeli and
Western audiences that Israel needs to change its policies in the Occupied Territories. The
viewer does not know what Palestinians experiencing the situation in Hebron think about
the Settlers and the military, or what actions are being taken or policies enacted in order to
change the situation from the side of the Palestinians. Therefore, despite capturing the 140 "B'Tselem's Camera Project," http://www.btselem.org/video/cdp_background. 141 According to their website, B’tselem “acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories and ensure that its government, which rules the Occupied Territories, protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law.” ("About B'Tselem," http://www.btselem.org/about_btselem.). 142 "Army Seals Palestinian Shops in Hebron, 2010," http://www.btselem.org/video/2010/08/army‐seals‐palestinian‐shops‐hebron.
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perpetration of an injustice from the perspective of a Palestinian cameraperson, the video,
and videos from other such organizations,143 conforms to the tendency for Palestinians to
be portrayed as “helpless victims of forces beyond their control” rather than as “actors at
the centre of critical phases of their modern history.”144
In addition to videos on the websites of human rights organizations, Palestinian
experiences in Hebron are presented in the form of personal narratives in books such as
Wendy Pearlman’s Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intafada.
Pearlman, an American‐Jewish woman from the Mid‐West studying the Middle East, set out
to “bring Palestinian voices to audiences that have had little opportunity to hear
Palestinians speak for themselves.”145 Importantly, the narratives presented in Pearlman’s
book offer a more nuanced continuum of experience and emotion than the videos discussed
above, which primarily capture the trauma of confrontation without its contextualization
within a broader stream of human experience.
For example, Pearlman transcribes the narrative of a young woman from Hebron
named Iman who is a senior at Birzeit University. Iman’s family, like all families living in
Hebron, is caught up in the events that have shaped the current situation in the city. During
Ramadan in 1994, her father decided to take a day off from work in order to bring his
children to the Ibrahimi Mosque to pray. Iman and her oldest brother did not go because
they were not feeling well, Iman says, “so my Dad went with my two other brothers. And he
came back home with only one of them.”146 Iman’s thirteen year‐old brother had been
143 See the Christian Peacemaker Teams’ video page for further examples. ("Christian Peacemaker Teams," http://www.youtube.com/user/CPTHebron#p/.). 144 Matar, What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood: xi. 145 Pearlman, Occupied voices: stories of everyday life from the second Intifada: xxvii. 146 Ibid., 170.
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killed by Baruch Goldstein in the massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque. “He was one year
younger than I was,” Iman says, “and we were practically twins.”147 Since the massacre,
according to Iman, each member of her family has been impacted by, internalized, and tried
to cope with the killing of her brother, and it has strained the relationships between
surviving members of the family. “Our relationships with each other should be warm and
positive,” Iman says, “but instead there are so many problems separating us.”148
On top of the tragedy of her brother’s death, Iman’s narrative recounts daily
harassments at the hands of soldiers and settlers in Hebron. “We try to avoid getting
involved with the settlers,” Iman says, “but we always find ourselves in one bad situation
after another.”149 Iman details the experiences of her family from being spit on by settlers
and harassed in the street by their children, to imprisoned family members being tortured
in Israeli jails and the suppression and criminalization of any reaction on the part of
Palestinians to the situation in the city. However, Iman’s narrative does not paint a
monolithic picture of her experiences or of those on the other side. “I don’t believe all Jews
are bad…” Iman says, “One of the soldiers wanted to hit me. Another one… tried to calm me
down. He even gave me tissues to wipe my tears.”150 Yet, despite the occasional moments of
empathy shown by the soldiers, Iman is skeptical, even pessimistic, about the ability of
Israelis and Palestinians to live together. “In the past I wouldn’t have minded if Jews lived
here with us in peace…” Iman says, “[but] I just don’t want to have to deal with the Israelis
147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 171. 149 Ibid., 170. 150 Ibid., 173‐74.
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anymore. After all the killing that has taken place, it is going to be impossible for us to live
side by side with them.”151 Even so, Iman says, “my ultimate goal is peace.”152
Iman’s narrative does not communicate a passive acquiescence to oppression and
the status quo of the conflict. Instead, Iman has adopted an attitude of steadfast resolve and
purpose in the face of potentially crushing life experiences. “I tell myself I can’t surrender,”
she says, “I have to cope with the situation and give my support to those who have lost
loved ones and homes.”153 In response to her family’s own tragedy, Iman is studying
Psychology in order to put herself in a position where she can help others who are
suffering in ways similar to how her family has suffered. Moreover, Iman does not
understand her aspiration to be able to help others cope with the psychological impacts of
occupation, dispossession, and tragedy strictly in terms of helping individuals. “I need to
graduate so I can be of service to my people…” she says, “there is a cause that is more
important: Palestine.”154 While acting individually in order to cope with her own family
history and help others cope with similar experiences, Iman sees her actions as
contributing to the recognition of a larger purpose intimately intertwined with her own life
experiences: the realization of self‐determination for the Palestinian people.
Iman’s narrative delves into aspects of the experiences of Palestinians living in
Hebron that are not accessible through the video clips posted on the websites of human
rights organizations. By operating in a different orientation toward time from the videos,
Iman’s narrative does not solely document the moment of experiencing a trauma or
injustice, but reflects on a continuum of life experiences that includes experiences of
151 Ibid., 174. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid., 176. 154 Ibid.
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injustice, or tragedy in Iman’s case, as well as coping, reflection, personal and social
aspirations, and resistance. As a result, the expanded time orientation of personal
narratives, such as the ones recorded by Pearlman, succeeds in capturing the role of
Palestinians as agents at the center of shaping their individual and collective life
experiences. The conveyance of individual and group agency as well as a complexity of
experience depicted, in such narratives, challenges the persistent notions of illegitimacy
surrounding Palestinian identity. However, personal narratives recorded by outsiders are
not free from the politics of presentation, as the dynamics of interaction between
interviewer and interviewee shape the nature of the narratives told.155 Additionally,
researchers ultimately exercise editorial control over the context of presentation and the
conclusions drawn from the narratives.
5.3 Discerning Palestinian Perspectives: The narratives and videos captured by researchers and human rights activists are
not discredited by their reliance on third party translation and validation, but they also
cannot be said to represent a collective articulation of group history and identity in the
same way as the books produced by the Jewish settlers of Hebron. Therefore, it is difficult
to draw conclusions about the construction of belonging and identity that informs the
Palestinian community of Hebron’s posture in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. At the same
time, however, the videos and narratives captured and relayed by human rights activists
and academic researchers provide insight into a realm of experiences that has historically
been blocked to Western audiences due to a monopolization of the role of explaining 155 In her article on approaches generating and analyzing narrative data, Lena Wiklund‐Gustin states, “we are not authors of existence, but co‐authors of its meaning… in research… we become part of other peoples worlds… which must be accounted for in our search for narrative data.” (Lena Wiklund‐Gustin, "Narrative hermeneutics: in search of narrative data," Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 24, no. Journal Article (2010): 33.)
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Palestinian experiences by forces hostile to Palestinian interests. As a result, while not
offering an officially compiled narrative, the material relayed by third parties provides
insight into the events, experiences, and perspectives shaping notions of Palestinian
identity and belonging in Hebron.
Specifically, and perhaps expectedly, the central presence of harassment by soldiers
and settlers in the videos and narratives suggests that the conflict between Palestinians
and the Jewish settlers, backed by the Israeli military, forms a major focal point for the
experiences of the Palestinian community in Hebron. Additionally, Iman’s distinction
between Jews and Israelis in her narrative provides a window into the construction of
Palestinian identity in relation to the ‘other’ in Hebron. Iman states that she would not have
minded if Jews had lived in Hebron in Peace, but does not know if she can tolerate the
presence of Israelis after everything that has happened in the conflict. From one
perspective, Iman’s statement reads as a nuanced distinction between all Jews and Israelis
who seek to expand settlements in the West Bank and impose military rule on Palestinians.
However, from another perspective, Iman’s distinction between Jews and Israelis reads
similarly to the Settlers’ refusal to acknowledge the national ambitions of the Palestinian
people. In Iman’s narrative, as long as the Jews in Hebron do not have national ambitions it
is possible for them to coexist peacefully with Palestinians. However, once the Jews are
understood to have national ambitions they become Israelis, conflict defines relations
between the two groups, and the possibility for coexistence fades away.
Iman’s distinction suggests that Palestinians in Hebron, like the Settlers, define
identity and belonging in the city in exclusionary, national terms. Both groups would
tolerate the presence of the other as long as the other did not have its own national
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ambitions. Furthermore, since each group defines its identity in nationally exclusive terms,
assertions of belonging made by one group threaten to erase the identity of the other.
However, unlike the Settlers, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, according to
Iman’s narrative, does not stem from originary and irreconcilable differences. Instead, the
inability of the two sides to live together stems from the experiences of dispossession,
dominance, and control that underlie the conflict for Palestinians. Consequently, Iman’s
narrative suggests that reconciliation is a possibility provided that the two national groups
can adequately address the issues of injury, inequality, and injustice underlying the conflict.
However, the fact that the underlying issues in the conflict for Palestinians stem from the
enactment of exclusionary nationalist claims by Israelis severely complicates the possibility
for reconciliation as long as the assertions of the two groups remain mutually exclusive.
Importantly, though, while the videos and narratives relayed to the outside world by
third parties provide glimpses into the Palestinian community of Hebron’s construction of
identity and belonging, they do not represent a collective articulation in the same way as
the texts published by the Jewish settlers of Hebron. Even so, the voices and experiences
that are relayed speak clearly to the agency of Palestinians in negotiating the defining
experiences of harassment by settlers and the constant presence and intrusion of soldiers
into everyday life. However, the Palestinian community of Hebron remains dependent on
outside actors imbued with the credibility Palestinians lack in order to translate their
experiences, voices, and perspectives to the outside world. As a result, a thorough
understanding of the Palestinian community of Hebron’s definition of identity and
belonging, as well as its relation to the conflict, remains elusive due to the persistent
difficulties surrounding Palestinian self‐presentation. Turning from the problematics of
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Palestinian self‐presentation and exclusionary definitions of identity and belonging in
Hebron, the following section explores the ideology, construction of space, and activities of
NSWS as an intentionally bi‐national and bilingual village in Israel and the village’s relation
to the overarching setting of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
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6.0 Narratives of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam:
6.1 Understanding the Oasis: Starkly dissimilar to the omnipresence of conflict in Hebron, a sense of tranquility and
harmony pervades the physical environment and daily interactions at NSWS. Indeed, the
village, as its history suggests, is an attempt to construct a space of equality shared
between Palestinians and Israelis in an otherwise asymmetrical and unequally shared
reality. As such, NSWS offers a radically different response than either mainstream Zionism
or religious Zionism to the questions raised about the nature of Israel as a state following
the June 1967 War. Instead of focusing on claims of ethno‐national or divine hegemony, the
creation of NSWS embodies an attempt to grapple with the existence of two national
communities within Israel and the questions of history, identity, and justice that their
presence raises.
Furthermore, the narratives of NSWS depict an inescapable awareness that the
village exists within the unequal relationships of power characterizing the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict as a whole. The recognition of NSWS as situated within the
conflict motivates and informs the activities of the village which seek to create spaces for
Israelis and Palestinians, as individuals and as groups, to understand and engage with their
positions in the overarching conflict. However, the narratives also illuminate a tension
between the effectiveness of the attitudinal changes facilitated by the activities of the
village and the need for structural change in order to transform the material reality of the
conflict. In addition to engaging critically with the dominant constructions of identity and
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belonging in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, NSWS’s work intersects critically with the
broader field of encounter and coexistence work in Israel that has attempted, through
various paradigms, to facilitate better relations between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. As
a reflection of NSWS’s approach, the narratives produced by the community challenge the
development, imposition, and recapitulation of essentialized categories of belonging and
identity in Israeli society and the presumptions informing the work of the coexistence
industry that has sought to mediate and improve relations between the two communities.
6.2 NSWS’s Self-Presentation: The ideologies and actions of NSWS and the Jewish settlers of Hebron are so
dramatically different that it seems strange to talk of there being similarities between the
two narratives. However, like the Hebron settlers, the community of NSWS has undertaken
to explain its existence as well as its relation to Israeli society as a whole. Additionally, the
narrative seeks to prove the community’s merits by laying out its arguments in texts
available to a broader public. Unsurprisingly the similarities are limited to the motivations
behind the production of the communities’ narratives and do not extend into actual
content. While the narratives of the Jewish settlers focus on a selective telling of
community history oriented according to a biblical time scale in order to constitute a sense
of identity and belonging in Hebron and with the Israeli mainstream, the narratives
produced by NSWS engage in an explanation and academic exploration of the activities of
the village as well as the telling of personal narratives that aim to illuminate the impact of
the village’s activities on the contemporary reality of conflict in which it exists.
Two texts produced by NSWS, Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue: The
School for Peace Approach edited by Rabah Halabi and Growing up Together: Becoming
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what we Believe published by American Friends of Neve Shalom/ Wahat al‐Salam,
illuminate the various facets of the community’s activities for an external audience. The
first text is a collection of essays written by staff at the School for Peace at NSWS and
academics from various Israeli universities. Its aim, in the words of Halabi, “is the
integration of academic knowledge with personal experience.”156 To this end, the book
contains ten essays that seek to illuminate both the practice and pedagogy of the encounter
programs run by the School for Peace and their relation to and impact on Israeli society.
The book, originally published in Hebrew in 2000, was published in English in 2004 and is
geared toward an academic audience interested in intergroup encounter work and
individuals interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
The second text contains a series of interviews conducted by staff at the primary
school at NSWS with both Jewish and Palestinian graduates from the school. It is a much
more personal and informal text that aims to create an impression of the experience of
attending the NSWS primary school as well as its lasting and diverse impacts on the lives of
graduates through their own words. Both texts focus on the conflict between Palestinians
and Israelis living within Israel, as opposed to between Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories and Israelis, and seek to analyze and demonstrate the relevance of the NSWS
approach to the reality of conflict in Israeli society. Together, the two texts illuminate the
foundational ideology, construction of space, and processes that inform and result from the
activities of the NSWS as well as explore their impact on and intercession into the
surrounding structures of the conflict.
156 Rabah Halabi and Deb Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 14.
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6.3 The work of the village: The activities of NSWS form the platforms through which the ideologies of the
village are enacted and by which the village engages with the surrounding conflict. In
accordance with the vision of Bruno Hussar, the actual act of Palestinians and Israelis living
together in the village is the most basic and foundational activity of NSWS. Now, more than
fifty families, both Palestinian and Israeli, live together at NSWS. Growing naturally from
the fact that families began moving to the village with their children, and continued to have
more, the village opened a primary school in 1984 to provide education for the children of
NSWS. After initially only serving the children of families living in NSWS, the primary
school is now open to children from surrounding villages, and ninety percent of pupils
enrolled come from outside of NSWS. Since 1984, over 300 children have graduated from
the primary school.
The village is also home to the School for Peace, which was part of Hussar’s original
vision for NSWS. Founded in 1976, the School for Peace has hosted more than 45,000 youth
and adults in their encounter programs. The School for Peace runs encounters for eleventh
grade students as well as for professionals, academics, and others interested in “meeting
the other side.” In addition, since 1990 the School for Peace has partnered with the
Department of Psychology at Tel‐Aviv University to run a yearlong encounter course for
university students. The encounter course is now also offered at Ben‐Gurion University,
Hebrew University, and the University of Haifa, and the school started a facilitator training
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course in 1991 to train interested individuals in the School for Peace’s approach to
coexistence work in Israel.157
While the intentional sharing of a community between Palestinians and Israelis
within Israel is unique, the educational activities of NSWS fall within a broader field of
coexistence and encounter work. The field of encounter work emerged after the
establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, while the Palestinian community in Israel was
governed by military rule, as an attempt to mediate relations between the Jewish majority
and Palestinian minority in the newly formed country and lasted through the 1960s. The
first phase of encounter work, according to Mohammed Abu‐Nimer, “employed a
domination approach to coexistence.”158 Israeli security services and labor unions planned
the first encounters in order to coerce Palestinian Israelis into symbolic displays of loyalty
to the state of Israel in order to legitimize the status quo. However, in the 1970s and 1980s
organizations running the encounters turned to a cultural exchange model that aimed at
acquainting Jewish Israelis with Palestinian cultural traditions. Palestinian Israelis
encouraged participation in the second phase of encounter programs as a way of exploring
the possibility of integrating into the mainstream Israeli society.
The encounter industry grew rapidly in the 1980s and changed its approaches and
objectives in response to the expanding popularity of the racist ideology of the Kach
Party159 in Israel. The traction of the Kach party in Israeli society was reflected by a number
157 Ahmad Hijazi, ed. Growing up Together: Becoming what we believe (Sherman Oaks, CA: American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al‐Salam, 2008), 4‐5, 61‐63; Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 8, 59‐60, 79, 97‐99. 158 Mohammed Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," Journal of Social Issues 60, no. 2 (2004): 408. 159 The Kach party, now outlawed in Israel, advocated for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel. Many of the religious settlers in the West Bank supported the movement. (Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories: 35.)
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of public opinion surveys conducted in the 1980s that, according to Ifat Maoz, “indicated
growing right‐wing extremism and increased anti‐democratic and anti‐Arab tendencies
among Israeli Jews.”160 The growth of racist and anti‐Arab sentiment within Israeli society
prompted educators and others to mobilize coexistence programs as a means of reducing
stereotypes and increasing cross‐cultural understanding and harmony. However,
shortcomings of the cross‐cultural model prompted some Palestinian Israeli facilitators
and participants in encounter work to develop an alternative approach. The approach,
known either as the conflict or confrontation model, recognized and sought to address the
conflict in Israeli society stemming from political and social inequalities between
Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. The ideology informing NSWS’s approach to encounter
work stems from and seeks to address the challenges of the conflict approach to
encounters between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis.161
6.4 NSWS’s Foundational ideology: Starting from Bruno Hussar’s original vision for the village, the ideology guiding
NSWS’s activities has evolved in response to the experiences of the village since its
founding and the changing contours and challenges of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Initially, according to Rabah Halabi, head of the School for Peace Research Center at NSWS,
the village sought to unite people around commonalities and eschewed delving into
potentially divisive political issues. NSWS’s approach early on followed the cultural
160 I. Maoz, "Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation‐aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians," JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH 48, no. 1 (2011): 116. 161 Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," 406‐08; Maoz, "Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation‐aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians," 119‐20; Zvi Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture," Journal of Peace Education 4, no. 1 (2007): 23.
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encounter model of coexistence work that emerged in 1970s and remained uncontested
through the 1980s. Even today, the majority of the nearly three hundred organizations in
Israel active in the field of encounter work use the cultural encounter model as the basis for
their meetings between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. As a result, the majority of the
approximately one in six Jewish Israelis who have participated in a planned encounter
between Palestinians and Israelis have taken part in a program focused on inter‐cultural
exchange.162
Over time, however, the School for Peace realized that interactions limited to cordial
contact, such as eating humus together, “may provide a good feeling for the moment but
solves nothing; rather it helps preserve the status quo and even fortifies it.”163 Instead of
continuing to pursue the cordial coexistence route, the activities of the village now proceed
from the premise that, in Halabi’s words, a sizeable Palestinian minority within Israel
challenges “the very structure of the Jewish state, which was unable to make space for the
figure of a proud Palestinian with civic and national aspirations.”164 As such, the ideology
informing the activities of the village acknowledges the structural marginality of
Palestinians living in Israel at its foundation. The importance of the recognition of
asymmetry in the conflict manifests itself in the work of the School for Peace, which, as Tel‐
Aviv University professor Arie Nadler writes, “aims to lead Arabs and Jews to genuinely and
openly address the inequality and the power differences that exist between them.”165
Consequently, NSWS is one of a few organizations that addresses the structural inequalities
162 Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," 406; Maoz, "Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation‐aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians," 116. 163 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 8. 164 Ibid., 5. 165 Ibid., 28.
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of the conflict, and the only organization in the field of encounter work that questions the
underlying assumption that Israel is a Jewish state, as opposed to a state for all its citizens,
in its encounter process.166
The School for Peace’s approach focuses on group level dynamics rather than
interactions between individuals. The elevation of group dynamics follows from the
assertion that cordial contact, or the cultural encounter approach, does not have an impact
on the actual conflict, and instead actually serves to preserve the status quo. Cordial
contact, according to the School for Peace approach, assuages the consciences of Jewish
participants who are looking to validate their liberal self‐conceptions while blocking
Palestinians from being able to assert their collective political identity. The assertion of
Palestinian identity, the approach maintains, is necessary if the discriminatory status quo
in Israel is going to be challenged. The rationale of the School for Peace approach are
validated by Abu‐Nimer, Maoz, and Bekerman who agree that the widely practiced cultural
encounter model privileges the needs of Jewish Israelis as the dominant and powerful
group in the conflict and provides little of value to Palestinian Israeli participants.167 Two
premises, one following from the other, form the School for Peace’s point of departure from
the dominant model of encounter work. The first, as Nadler puts it, is that “our sense of
who we are is embedded in the groups to which we belong.”168 Since the conflict in Israel is
between national groups, the logic continues, “a significant dialogue between Jews and
166 Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," 411. 167 Ibid.; Maoz, "Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation‐aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians."; Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture." 168 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 25.
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Arabs is one that occurs between two adversarial groups and not simply between
individuals who come from the two groups.”169
The School for Peace’s approach enforces and fortifies national group identities
instead of aiming to create bonds beyond national affiliation. By doing so, the approach
maintains, it is possible to have a dialogue that alters the unequal structures of power
between Palestinians and Israelis that would otherwise go unchallenged. Thereby, each
group in a dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis can act as a mirror for the other in
order to reveal the groups’ collective assumptions about each other and build increased
awareness about their positions in the conflict. Furthermore, by preserving the group
character, the School for Peace staff argues, the dynamics that unfold between Palestinians
and Israelis in the context of NSWS’s activities can serve as analogies for and provide
insight into the conflict as a whole. The fact that the School for Peace views its activities as
interacting with and shedding light on the dynamics of the conflict as a whole reflects the
recognition that NSWS cannot be an isolated oasis, but instead must deal with and attempt
to transform the setting of conflict in which it is situated.170 However, the elevation of
group level dynamics risks reinforcing the exclusionary categories of Palestinian and
Jewish Israeli identity, and, according to Bekerman, “neglect[s] to account for the tight
relationship between this essentialist perspective of identity and the larger sociopolitical
context”171 – in this case, the context of conflict between mutually exclusive national
groups.
169 Ibid., 28. 170 Ibid., 28‐29, 51, 186. 171 Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture," 61.
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The philosophy guiding the practices of the School for Peace also underlies the other
activities of the village. Instead of simply being conceived of as a space for individuals to
live in harmony with one another, the village of NSWS, according to its mission, aspires “to
demonstrate that Jews and Palestinians can live and educate their children together as
equals, respecting one another’s language and culture.”172 Similarly, the mission of the
primary school states, “children are encouraged to strengthen their individual cultural
identities while they learn about and celebrate the history, culture, and language of the
other side.”173 Overall, the educational system at NSWS, according to primary school
principal Anwar Dawood, “fosters true democracy, promoting the attainment of individual
rights for each person, and collective rights for each group.”174 Therefore, the ideological
basis of the NSWS’s is critically departure from the dominant cultural understanding
approach to encounter work. Instead of trying to build bridges beyond differences, NSW’s
approach recognizes the asymmetrical power relations between Palestinians and Israelis
and focuses on altering dynamics between groups in order to provide lessons in and a
model for peace that is relevant to the encompassing reality of the conflict.
6.5 Construction of Space at NSWS: Space is constructed at NSWS in an attempt to embody the ideology of the village
both materially and socially. Most fundamentally, NSWS is conceived of and exists to be a
setting for educational endeavors that seek to intervene in and hopefully transform the
injustices and inequalities inherent in the conflict between Palestinians Israelis and Jewish
Israelis. Central to the village’s intervention is a self‐conscious manipulation of the existing
172 Hijazi, Growing up Together: Becoming what we believe, 61. 173 Ibid., 63. 174 Ibid., 1.
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power hierarchy within Israeli society. In order to facilitate the alteration of the existing
structure of dominance, NSWS strives to maintain numerical parity between Palestinians
and Israelis within the village and in its activities. The maintenance of numerical parity
extends into all levels of organization. For example, each class in the primary school is led
by both a Palestinian and an Israeli teacher and a Palestinian and an Israeli facilitator work
together to guide School for Peace encounters. Additionally, Palestinians and Israelis serve
together in the upper levels of municipal and government structures in the village, and in
the organizational hierarchies of the School for Peace and primary school. The presence of
Palestinian Israelis in the upper echelons of NSWS’s civic and organizational structures is a
rarity even within the field of encounter work.175 As a result of maintaining numerical
parity between Palestinians and Israelis and enabling both Palestinians and Israelis to
serve in positions of authority, NSWS is self‐consciously constructing the social, public,
educational, and organizational spaces of the village in order to alter the asymmetrical
power dynamics of the conflict. In doing so, the village presents itself as a model of what
peace might look like.
Also, both Arabic and Hebrew are official languages in the village, teachers in the
primary school instruct in their native language, and Arab participants in encounter
programs are encouraged to speak in Arabic even though Hebrew, for the most part, is the
common language between participants. Both languages are given equal weight in an
attempt to redress the supremacy of Hebrew in Israeli society and in recognition of the
important role language plays in the formation, expression, and maintenance of group
175 Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," 406.
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identity and culture.176 The construction of the spaces of the village and its activities as bi‐
national and bilingual enforces the group focus of NSWS’s philosophy and the view that
interactions within those spaces are, according to Halabi and School for Peace staff member
Nava Sonnenschein, “between two groups, two peoples, two identities.”177
6.6 The Encounter Process: In addition to the guiding ideology and construction of space at NSWS, the texts
produced by the village focus extensively on the educational process developed in the
primary school and, in particular, in the encounter programs run by the School for Peace.
The encounter programs are given the most weight because they are the primary way
NSWS interacts with the reality outside of the village, and hence are the most far‐reaching
application of the village’s ideology. In particular, Israeli and Palestinian Identities in
Dialogue provides a comprehensive explanation of the various stages of the encounter
process developed by the School for Peace. The discussion of the various stages of the
encounters facilitated by the School for Peace moves away from the academic and
theoretical nature of much of the text and provides a coherent narrative of the experience
of the encounters from the perspective of the school’s administrators. Additionally, the
narrative that the text develops illustrates the ideology of NSWS in application, and
provides the basis for a self‐reflective and self‐critical engagement, on the part of the
School for Peace staff, with the impact of the village’s activities.
According to administrators of the School for Peace, the typical encounter process
begins with a phase of initial exploration and declarations of intent. During the initial
176 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 7, 26, 40, 126; Hijazi, Growing up Together: Becoming what we believe, 63. 177 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 63.
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phase, the two groups taking part in the encounter meet each other for the first time and
interact with caution and politeness. Each side tries to get an idea of the expectations and
intentions of the other group, and the external power dynamics of the conflict remain intact
with the Jewish group occupying a position of dominance and control. After the initial
stage, the Palestinian group begins to coalesce around a few strong leaders who do most of
the talking on the group’s behalf. As the group grows in strength through the assertion that
its needs be met in the encounter, the leadership expands and more individuals take part in
articulating the group’s position. With the growth of its self‐confidence, the Palestinian
group brings up issues such as the definition of Israel as a Jewish state and the plight of
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora. At this point the power
dynamics in the encounter begin to feel as if the Palestinian group is becoming dominant,
or reversing the relations that exist in Israeli society at large. The Palestinian group is taken
aback by its strength, which does not exist in the reality outside of the encounter, and
wonders if it has gone too far.178
After initially accepting the assertions of the Palestinians, the narrative continues,
the Jewish group begins to push back because they experience the “loss of being on the side
of justice and the loss of their power as an erasure of their identity.”179 The claims of the
Palestinian group force the Jewish group to struggle with the gap between their liberal self‐
conception and the Palestinians’ perception of them as oppressors and occupiers. In
response to their feelings of depression and despair, the Jewish group attempts to regain
their position of authority by verbally attacking the Palestinian group. The Jewish group
178 Ibid., 61‐68. The claim by the School for Peace staff that the Jewish Israeli group experiences the Palestinian group’s self‐assertion as an erasure of identity supports the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli identities as being mutually exclusive. 179 Ibid., 67.
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attempts to delegitimize the Palestinians as a group by associating them with backwards,
un‐enlightened, and inhumane values, and justifies their own supremacy by associating
themselves with liberal and humanitarian values.180 The delegitimizing of the Palestinian
group takes place as an attack on Palestinian culture, which greatly distresses the
Palestinian group, and enables the Jewish group to feel it has regained control. The
dialogue enters an impasse with feelings of frustration and exhaustion on both sides. Both
groups question whether continuing the encounter is worthwhile, and a sense develops
that there are only two options. The groups can either accept the inevitability of conflict
and continued suffering on both sides, or they can do something to alter the status quo.181
From the despair and desperation experienced during the impasse, a more
egalitarian dialogue emerges. Both groups, according to the School for Peace
administrators, proceed from a “sincere desire to try to figure out how to live together in
equality and mutual respect.”182 The Jewish group acknowledges the asymmetry of the
reality of the conflict and their position as oppressors, and accepts responsibility for both.
The acknowledgement and willingness of the Jewish group to talk about the asymmetry of
the conflict builds trust between the two groups and enables the Palestinians to be an equal
partner in the dialogue. Tension still exists between the two groups, but it is no longer the
defining characteristic of their interaction. The groups begin to negotiate over the nature of
the state. The Palestinian group demands that Israel be a state for all citizens, not just a
Jewish state. When met with resistance from the Jewish group, the Palestinian group
demands autonomy from Jewish control. Ultimately, according to the School for Peace
180 The conceptions used by Jewish Israelis to delegitimize the Palestinian group are an articulation of the dominant Western discourse on Palestinians discussed above in chapters one and four. 181 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 68‐72. 182 Ibid., 74.
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administrators, the two groups in the encounter fail to agree on solutions to structural
inequalities of the conflict.183
The general phases of the encounter are essentially the same in all of the programs
run by the School for Peace whether they are for adults, university students, or secondary
school students. For university students, the phases extend over the course of two
semesters, which is the duration of the class. For secondary school students, the encounter
is more structured and involves a greater period of time spent pre‐planning on the part of
the School for Peace staff. The Palestinian and Jewish groups meet separately with School
for Peace staff ahead of time, and the encounter involves more time for the students to
become acquainted with one another. The facilitators use a series of activities in order to
spur relevant conversation, but the conversation proceeds according the phases of the
general model. At the end, instead of having an open ended conversation about future
possibilities the students engage in a simulation where they assume roles as government
officials and community leaders. The goal presented to the students for the encounter is for
them to come up with agreements on topics such as symbols of the state, governmental
representation, the future of education, and so forth. The secondary school encounter ends
with a concluding dialogue reflecting on the experience of the encounter and what the two
groups accomplished together.184
6.7 Reflection, Self-Criticism, and Applicability: NSWS’s success presents a major, open‐ended question that both texts produced by
the village aim to address. In the view of the narratives, NSWS has been successful in
responding to its ideological imperative to intercede in the conflict through the creation of
183 Ibid., 71‐76. 184 Ibid., 98‐117.
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institutions that both model and educate for peace, but are ambivalent about the question
of the impact of modeling and educating for peace have on the material reality of the
conflict. The texts produced by NSWS engage the question in very different ways. Growing
up Together utilizes interviews with former NSWS primary school students to
communicate an impression of the lasting impact of the primary school on their lives while
Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue presents a self‐critical reflection on the impact
and applicability of the School for Peace’s activities. On the one hand, Growing up Together
eschews the question of societal impact in favor of demonstrating the empowering role of
the primary school in the lives of individual graduates. On the other hand, Israeli and
Palestinian Identities in Dialogue conveys a sense of pessimism about the societal impact of
NSWS’s activities, but maintains the experience of the encounters can be allegorically
generalized to the setting of the conflict. Together, the texts offer a dim prognosis for the
possibility of educational activities altering reality by themselves, but they hold out hope
that they may take part in facilitating a broader social transformation toward peace. The
prognosis contained in the texts produced by NSWS mirrors the concerns and analysis of
scholars studying the encounter process in Israel who often cite the School for Peace as an
exemplary model compared to the more problematic, even regressive, practices of most
encounter organizations.185
The interviews in Growing up Together depict a wide array of interests and activities
held by NSWS primary school graduates, but the diversity is united by a sense of confidence
185 Abu‐Nimer, "Education for Coexistence and Arab‐Jewish Encounters in Israel: Potential and Challenges," 410‐11, 17; Maoz, "Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation‐aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians," 122; Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture," 21.
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and empowerment, public engagement, and the knowledge that the injustices and
inequalities of the conflict are not inevitable. Louie, a Palestinian graduate of the primary
school, said, “What I took from the NS/WAS [sic] School is not to be embarrassed to give my
opinion.”186 A sense that graduates of the primary school are not afraid to express
themselves or challenge other’s preconceived beliefs pervades the interviews. Additionally,
many of the graduates reported being active in the Israeli peace movement and other social
justice movements. For all, according to the interviews, the primary school has had a
lasting impact on how they view the other side. Inbar, a Jewish graduate who refused army
service, echoed the sentiment of many graduates when she said, “I am not capable of
making broad statements about Arabs… At a young age I got to see them as individuals.”187
Perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of NSWS, the students emerged from the
primary school with the knowledge that a world other than one defined by division and
conflict is possible. As Abdullah, a Palestinian graduate, said, “We were together all the
time, we really loved each other. The dream of Neve Shalom, we were living it. It can be a
reality.”188 The primary school staff who conducted the interviews did not draw a casual
relationship between the attitudes and activities of the graduates and their time at NSWS,
but they did conclude that the “school has played a formative and positive role in each of
their biographies.”189
The effects of the encounter programs reported by the School for Peace staff are
generally less optimistic and more ambiguous than those presented by the primary school.
Jewish participants in the School for Peace’s encounters are generally proud of the changes
186 Hijazi, Growing up Together: Becoming what we believe, 28. 187 Ibid., 23. 188 Ibid., 8. 189 Ibid., 26.
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they undergo and view the confrontation with their privilege as courageous and deserving
of recognition. However, from the perspective of Arab participants changing the power
dynamics within the encounter is not sufficient. As Halabi and Sonneschein write, “what
truly cries out for change is the oppressive and discriminatory reality in which they live
day after day.”190 After taking part in an encounter, School for Peace staff hope,
“participants can better chart their course”191 because of their newly gained insight and
awareness about the conflict and their positions in it. The staff is aware that the impact of
the experience on participants is mixed. After the encounter, Halabi states, some
participants “put the encounter behind them and make no meaningful changes; others try
to act on the experience, each in his or her own fashion.”192 According to Halabi, many
graduates of the encounter programs have become activists in peace advocacy and social
change organizations “where they attempt to integrate our philosophy into their work.”193
Additionally, most of the facilitators working in the field of intergroup encounter work in
Israel graduated from the School for Peace’s facilitator training course.
The hope behind the activities of both the primary school and School for Peace, and
indeed of NSWS as a whole, according to Halabi and Sonnenschein, is that “awareness gives
people the option to choose their path according to their understanding and
consciousness.”194 However, the authors maintain, “the most effective path to changing
reality is social and political action,”195 and NSWS is constructed as a space for educational
activities. Educational activities can bring people greater awareness of their surrounding
190 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 54. 191 Ibid., 186. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid., 49. 195 Ibid., 55.
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reality as well as their position in it, but do not alter the structures of the conflict.
Heightened awareness of the conflict and individual’s position in it can often bring
participants in NSWS’s educational activities into a “far‐from‐easy confrontation with
themselves and with the larger situation.”196 Palestinian students and encounter
participants often come away from encounters with a heightened consciousness of their
belonging to a systematically oppressed minority, which brings the manifestations of their
oppression in their day to day lives into sharp focus. Additionally, Jewish students and
participants often develop an understanding of the conflict and knowledge of Palestinians
outside the dominant view held in Israeli society, which creates a feeling of disjuncture
between themselves and their immediate social environments and society. The pain and
disjunction often experienced by participants in NSWS’s educational program is worth it,
according to the School for Peace staff, because “in awareness, however painful, is
embodied one of the most important human values: the right to have the choice and the
option to change and to be changed.”197 Interestingly, for programs designed to highlight
the group level dynamics, the hope that their organizers hold out for a more peaceful future
is the individual’s ability to act to alter the deterministic structures of the conflict through
self‐awareness.
However, the view that the educational activities of NSWS have little impact, in and
of themselves, on changing the reality of the conflict is a pessimistic corollary to the School
for Peace’s vision of heightening awareness of individual agency in order to make change.
Although the educational activities of NSWS have little direct effect on the material reality
of the conflict, the assumption on the part of the School for Peace staff that the encounter 196 Ibid., 57. 197 Ibid.
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group is a microcosm of reality enables the staff to imbue the encounter process with
representative significance to the dynamics of the conflict overall. As a microcosm of
reality, Halabi argues, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis can be read according
to the phases of the encounter program. The initial, exploratory phase of the encounter,
according to Halabi, correlates to the period from 1948 to 1967 when the Palestinians and
Israelis were getting acquainted with each other and trying to figure each other out in the
Israeli state. After 1967, Palestinians in Israel developed a stronger and more unified sense
of identity and attempted to assert themselves as a group in order to demand total equality
within the state. The violent suppression of Palestinians demonstrating within Israeli at the
outset of the Second Intifada marked the Jewish push back against Palestinian self‐
assertion.198 Today, according to Halabi, “we seem to be mired down somewhere in the
fourth stage: the Jews are… refusing to accept any change in the balance of power between
them and the Palestinians.”199 The current impasse, marked by uncertainty and hostility
between the two groups is the final phase before the commencement of a more egalitarian
dialogue or relationship, which if Palestinians and Israelis weather the trials ahead, Halabi
says, “awaits us, around the next bend in the road.”200
6.8 NSWS and Israeli Society: NSWS’s existence and activities are a challenge to the dominant construction of
identity and belonging in Israeli society. According to Couze Venn, the “formation of the
state of Israel as intrinsically Jewish” has an marginalizing effect for Palestinians living in
Israel. Atalia Omer adds, “Zionist ethnonational commitment delimits the extent of Israeli
198 Ibid., 51‐52, 188‐89. 199 Ibid., 189. 200 Ibid.
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liberalism as well as its modes of envisioning a just peace to the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict.”
Both Venn and Omer’s analysis support the view of Israeli identity being constructed
around exclusionary conceptions of identity and belonging. The systemic marginalization
of Palestinians living in Israel and the Israeli state’s limited ability to imagine and enact a
just and sustainable peace with Palestinians is clearly demonstrated by the history of
exclusion, oppression, violence, and ambiguity. Additionally, the exclusionary relationship
between Israeli identity and Palestinian identity shapes the nature of interactions between
the Israeli state and Palestinians living within its borders, and between Israel and
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Additionally, the asymmetrical and exploitative
status quo is supported and recapitulated by the dominant narratives of belonging and
identity in Israeli society, which adhere to the ethnonational commitment accompanying
the definition of Israel as an intrinsically Jewish state.
The texts of NSWS, however, depict a strong awareness of the institutionalization of
asymmetry in the dominant Israeli narrative and social structure, and present the activities
of NSWS as striving to create a basis for interaction and existence between Palestinians and
Israelis other than the current inequalities. In the narrative of the encounter process
presented in Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue, the ideal outcome of the
encounter is for the two groups to recognize each other as equals and to treat each other
with mutual respect in the process of addressing the status quo, which is seen as
intolerable and necessary to change. Similarly, the graduates of the NSWS primary school
interviewed in Growing up Together articulate an attitude of equality, acceptance, and
friendship with the other incongruous with society at large. Furthermore, the School for
Peace staff’s reading of the conflict through the lens of the encounter process leads them to
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conclude, “the asymmetrical relations on the outside will be prone to change only if and
when the Arabs in Israel become stronger and force these changes to take place.” Finally,
the construction of space, both physically and socially, at NSWS aims to redress the existing
power inequalities between Palestinians and Israelis by breaking out of the mutually
exclusive paradigm of the conflict and demarcating the village and its activities as bi‐
national and bilingual spaces.
However, NSWS’s bases its attempt to create conditions for two nations, two
languages, and two cultures to exist within the same space without negating each other on
a reinforcement of essentialized categories of identity. Paradoxically, the identities NSWS
reinforces also contribute to the intractability of the conflict outside the village. The
difficulty in demonstrating the effectiveness of NSWS’s model of encounter work, and the
field of coexistence work in general, may stem from an intrinsic connection between the
essentialist paradigm of identity and the exclusivist project of the nation state. The
questions that remain are what changes can be made to current approaches to encounter
work that will address the asymmetrical and exploitative relations between Palestinians
and Israelis both within Israel and in the Occupied Territories, and the essentialist
construction of identity underlying and fueling the Palestinian/Israeli conflict within the
exclusivist setting of the nation state paradigm.
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7.0 Conclusion: The claim that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is embedded in the exclusivist setting of the
nation state paradigm, and that it is this setting that perpetuates the conflict due to the
inability of either side, thus far, to imagine viable alternatives to the current impasse
warrants a more in depth explanation. According to Omer, “the nation is by definition an
exclusionary political entity.”201 In order for the nation to be “imagined in its national
oneness,”202 the state has to enact a social and physical process of transformation. The
process includes demarcating and solidifying borders while weaving diverse populations
into a unitary national fabric by superseding existing affiliations through the dissemination
of a grand narrative of national becoming that concurs with the national territory.203
Furthermore, the formulation of national narratives of becoming is an ontological process
that privileges a certain identity in order to demarcate the boundaries of the national group
through an exclusivist system of power.204 Therefore, the nation state and national identity
are inherently exclusionary due to their positioning of the national individual, national
community, and national territory in opposition to an excluded other or others.205
201 Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice," 658. 202 E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 203 Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture," 26.; Bekerman focuses particularly on the institutionalization of education as a tool for the creation of national citizens. 204 i.e. identity X is national and therefore is afford rights associated with belonging to a nation. Whereas identity Y is not part of the nation and therefore is not guaranteed rights and may likely be perceived as threatening to the national community. 205 Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). 57‐64.
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In the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for example, the definition of the
State of Israel as intrinsically Jewish makes full belonging to the Israeli national community
contingent on the possession of Jewish identity.206 As a result, individuals whose identities
are explicitly defined as other than “the Jewish People,” such as the Palestinians, are
excluded from full belonging within the state. Conflict arises from the fact that the national
territory is not composed of a unitary population, and indeed is inhabited by a large group
of people who do not fit within the national identity. Omer points out that the further a
state “moves away from ethnoreligo‐centric conceptions of citizenship, the greater it
demonstrates more liberal and inclusive policies toward minorities.”207 However, as is
clearly illuminated by the tension between the religious settlers of Hebron and the
mainstream of secular Zionism, the connection between religion as a lived category and
identity is a point of contest within Israel while the ethno‐national definition of the State is
accepted as axiomatic.
Despite the tension, which in the case of the Settlers focuses on divine versus
worldly interpretations of redemption, the political theology of secular Zionism pulls from
the same religious resources as the Zionism of the Settlers in the process of defining
identity and belonging within the State of Israel. The difference between the two stems
from mainstream Zionism’s interpretation of these resources through the lens of secular
nationalism. The framework of nationalism conflates territory, identity, and belonging
through the authority of a secularized reading of Jewish history into an exclusivist and
exclusionary definition of identity and belonging within the State of Israel. As testament to
206 Venn, "The Repetition of Violence: Dialogue, the Exchange of Memory, and the Question of Convivial Socialities," 285. 207 Omer, "The Hermenuetics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice," 658.
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the strength of the exclusionary setting of the nation state paradigm on the conflict
between Palestinians and Israelis, Omer observes, the majority of Jewish Israelis who
participate in peace activities “accept a definition of Israel as necessitating the cultivation
and maintenance of Jewish majoritarianism.”208 Therefore, attempts to mediate the conflict
between Palestinians and Israelis, both within Israel and between Israel and the Occupied
Territories, remain fully embedded in the exclusivist setting of the nation state paradigm.
As a result, relations between Israelis and Palestinians are stuck between the perceived
impossibility of coexistence within the same territory and the, apparently, equally difficult
task of separating and homogenizing a historically integrated and heterogeneous
geographic area in order to realize the ideal of exclusivist sovereignty within two separate
nation states.
The intentionally bi‐national and bilingual construction of NSWS, then, is a critical
response to the limitations of the current paradigm of the conflict. Yet, despite providing an
alternative to the mutually exclusive constructions of Palestinian and Israeli identity and
belonging within Israel, NSWS is not a panacea. First of all, NSWS’s activities are
educational, and as the School for Peace staff points out, “any encounter, does not in and of
itself change reality.”209 While NSWS’s activities seek to enhance people’s awareness of
their position within the conflict, they do not offer a framework for engaging in action
aimed at altering the status quo. Additionally, the activities of the village are largely limited
to addressing the conflict between Palestinians and Jews within Israel. As such, the
activities fail to comprehensively and directly address the underlying issues of
displacement, dispossession, and occupation that resulted in, and continue, the historic 208 Ibid., 668. 209 Halabi and Reich, Israeli and Palestinian identities in dialogue: the school for peace approach: 55.
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fracturing of the Palestinian people among various entities. In other words, by primarily
focusing on issues of inequality between Palestinians and Jews within Israel, NSWS fails to
adequately address the intimate connections between the position of Palestinians within
Israel and the history and treatment of Palestinians as a group subjected to various regimes
of control by the State of Israel.
Furthermore, NSWS’s focus on group level dynamics paradoxically reinforces the
essentialized categories of identity that underlie the central contentions of the conflict. By
treating each group as a totalizing whole, encounters based on the inter‐group
confrontation model risk reinforcing the homogenized approach to culture and identity
that informs the exclusivist assertions of the nation state paradigm. However, as Bekerman
points out, simply moving beyond the essentialist approach to identity in the conflict
neglects the reality of the political situation between Israelis and Palestinians. A supra‐
national approach predicated on the assertion of mutual humanity, in fact, serves the
interests of the dominant group in society in much the same way as the cultural exchange
model of encounter work. Instead of addressing the issues of the conflict, the mutual
humanity approach in an encounter, according to Bekerman, is “fully abstracted from the
outside reality… and could only be interpreted as a new turn of Jewish denial of the
Palestinian cause.”210 Tellingly, Palestinian participants experience this approach as an
erasure of identity.211 As a result, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict presents the predicament
of needing to move beyond exclusivist constructions of identity while not being able to
ignore the salience of those identities for the individuals and groups in the conflict.
210 Bekerman, "Rethinking Intergroup Encounters: Rescuing Praxis from Theory, Activity from Education, and Peace/Co‐Existence from Identity and Culture," 32. 211 Ibid.
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The dearth of alternatives to the dichotomous logic of identity and its accompanying
exclusivist claims of belonging points to the importance of developing and cultivating third
spaces212 within the conflict. Such third spaces operate on two levels within the context of
Palestine/Israel. The first is as a space of translation between essentialized conceptions of
identity, as a first space, and the abstracted and unobtainable second space of
universalism.213 In this sense, a third space is connected to the salience of identity, enforced
by lived experience, for groups within the conflict and at the same time attentive to the acts
of transference that constitute human cultures and characterize geographic spaces as
inherently heterogeneous.214 Instead of striving for an empty universalism based on the
eschewal of differences,215 such a space enables a reading of the creolized nature of human
existence in the process of constructing identity and belonging. Importantly, third spaces
offer an alternative to the enforcement of homogenized identities in the inter‐group
confrontation approach to encounter work and the empty universalism of models based on
the mutual humanity perspective.
Additionally, third spaces operate on a second level between the exclusionary
identities of Palestinians and Israelis, operating as the first space, and the geographic
212 Bhabha, The location of culture: 52‐56. 213 Adam Seligman explains what I refer to as empty universalism in terms of “’thick’ moral communities” and a “’thinly’ defined public sphere.” ‘Thick’ moral communities such as religious communities, or the tightly defined Israeli and Palestinian ethno‐national communities, for an “intimate and manageable sphere… where we grant one another a certain degree of moral credit, predicated on our shared communal, religious, ethnic, or racial pasts.” The ‘thinly defined public sphere, however, only enables interaction “according to abstract and increasingly impersonal rules of justice.” In this case, appeals to common humanity in the universalist approach are predicted on the ‘thinly’ defined public sphere abstracted from the shared foundation necessary for meaningful interaction. (Adam B. Seligman, "Living together differently. (Constitutionalism and Secularism in an Age of Religious Revival: The Challenge of Global and Local Fundamentalisms)," Cardozo Law Review 30, no. 6 (2009).) 214 According to Bhabha, “cultures are never unitary in themselves, not simply dualistic in the relation of Self and Other.” (Bhabha, The location of culture: 52.) 215 David W. Montgomery, "Otherness and the Experience of Difference: From Encountering and Evaluating to Eschewing or Enduring," International Summer School on Religion and Public Life 2(2009).
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territory contested by each group’s exclusivist claims of belonging as the second space. On
this level, third spaces provide a forum for direct engagement with the underlying issues in
the conflict. By foregrounding the central contention of the conflict—i.e. two national
communities claiming exclusive belonging to the same territory—third spaces connect the
series of displacements, dispossessions, and mutual threats that characterize the conflict to
the roots of the hostilities. Third spaces at this level, then, are forums of negotiation
between the mutually exclusive identities of the conflict and the fact of their existence
within the same territory. On both levels, third spaces enable Palestinians and Israelis to
discuss, debate, imagine, and attempt to develop and enact alternatives to the current
impasse of the conflict.
Despite its limitations, NSWS’s bi‐national and bilingual construction of space and
activities in the field of encounter work provide for a study and theorization of third spaces
within the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Additionally, the study of NSWS opens the way for an
engagement with other such spaces both intentionally and unintentionally constructed.
However, the political realities represented by the intractability of the Hebron settlers’
construction of identity and belonging offers a less then optimistic corollary to the
possibilities presented by third spaces. Importantly, third spaces form at the nexus of
intractable realities, and offer the opportunity to develop alternatives to the status quo. The
process of inter‐group negotiation facilitated by third spaces is an important step away
from the current attempts to resolve the conflict that remain wedded to the exclusivist
setting of the nation state paradigm. Indeed, in a setting where what is considered to be
practical offers a recapitulation of the underlying causes of conflict and is also proving to be
impracticable, what options exist other than beginning to re‐imagine the possibilities for
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existence between peoples while simultaneously working to realize their practical
application? Third spaces provide a foundation from which to begin this process.
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APPENDIX A:
MAPS
A.1 Map of Israel/Palestine216
216 Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. "Israel," University of Texas at Austin, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia11/israel_sm_2011.gif.
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A.2 Israel and surrounding States after June 1967 War217
217 Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. "Israel and Bordering States," University of Texas at Austin, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/israel_bordering_states_pol_1970.jpg.
102
A.3 Territory Near NSWS218
218 NSWS is located in the pink section of the map titled “No Man’s Land.” It is not for from Dayt Ayyub on the Map. Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. "West Bank ‐ Jerusalem and West," University of Texas at Austin, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/westbank_central92.jpg.
103
A.4 Hebron and Surrounding Areas219
219 Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. "West Bank ‐ Far South Including Hebron," University of Texas at Austin, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/westbank_south92.jpg.
104
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